Celeb technocrats from India – Part 2

Celeb technocrats from India – Part 2

Our country boasts of being the birthplace of some popular technocrats of the world such as Nandan Nilekani, Arun Maira, Kaushik Basu, Satya Nadella, Narayana Murthy and the likes who with their hard-work, experience and knowledge have successfully led Indian as well as international enterprises such as Google, Adobe, Hotmail etc. Read more here!

In continuation of Shiksha’s listing of these technological experts, we bring you some more stalwarts who have changed the way global markets and enterprises view Indians as well as the quality of education offered at Indian educational institutions.

Sudha Murthy

Sudha Murthy

Course: MTech in Computer Science

Institute: Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore

Year: 1974

The scholarly author and social worker, Sudha Murthy, was a gold medalist in BTech (electrical engineering) from BV Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering & Technology, Hubli. She was also awarded a gold medal by the Indian Institute of Engineers for holding the first position at Indian Institute of Science MTech course in Computer Science.

As they say, there is a woman behind every successful man, Sudha Murthy is every bit that woman. She has always supported and helped Narayana Murthy in all his endeavours. She shelled out the initial funding of Rs 10,000 which formed the foundation stone to set up the IT giant Infosys. But that is not all she has to her credit, a trained programmer, Murthy was the first woman engineer to have worked at Tata Motors (then referred to as Telco). She is the chairperson of Infosys Foundation and is also a member of Gates Foundation’s initiatives on public health.

Murthy has also featured in some movies such as Prarthana (Kannada film) and Pitruroon (Marathi film).

Murthy now serves as a philanthropist and has set up many orphanages, worked on rural development and also proposed establishing libraries and setting up computers at government schools in Karnataka. She also established The Murthy Classical Library of India at Harvard University.

Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai

Course: Masters in Engineering and Material Science

Institute: Stanford University

Talk to IIT Kharagpur professors and they would reveal that Sundar Pichai as we know him today was referred to as Pichai Sundararajan in 1989 when he was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical department. Pichai not only topped in his BTech programme but was awarded by  IIT Kharagpur for excellence in academics. He then went on to pursue his MS from Stanford University followed by masters in business administration from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Here too, Pichai was awarded with titles such as Palmer Scholar and Siebel Scholar.

Pichai worked at Applied Materials and McKinsey & Company. He joined Google in 2004 and held the portfolio of product management and innovation. He was responsible for software products such as Google chrome, chrome OS and Google drive. He also worked on developing apps such as Google maps and Gmail.  

Larry Page, Google’s CEO was once quoted as saying that Pichai possesses an in-built talent to create products which are excellent technically and at the same time are extremely user-friendly.

His talent and knowledge is known the world over and that is the reason why he is known to have been offered a post at Twitter and was also considered for the post of Microsoft CEO.

He is currently serving as the senior vice-president at Google wherein he oversees Google apps, Chrome and Android.

Sabeer Bhatia

Sabeer Bhatia

Course: Master’s in Electrical Engineering

Institute: Stanford University

Sabeer Bhatia joined BITS Pilani campus at Rajasthan to pursue a bachelor’s degree in engineering. But as luck would have it he was awarded a foreign transfer from the institute in 1988 and thereafter, he pursued his degree at California Institute of Technology. He then joined Stanford University to pursue his master’s in electrical engineering.

In 1992, Bhatia dropped out of his PhD and accepted the post of hardware engineer at Apple Computer Inc. followed by Firepower Systems Inc.  It was at this firm that the idea of setting up Hotmail first came to him and he along with his friend and colleague, Jack Smith launched Hotmail in 1996.

He sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1998 and worked there for a year after which he founded an e-commerce website called arzoo.com in 1999.

Vinod Dham

Vinod Dham

Course: Master’s in Electrical Engineering

Institute: University of Cincinnati

Year: 1977

Vinod Dham joined Delhi College of Engineering in 1971 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He then left for the US with only $8 in his pocket to pursue a degree there.  He joined master’s degree in electrical engineering with solid state science as his specialty from the University of Cincinnati in 1975.

Before starting his post-graduation studies, Dham worked at Continental Devices, a semi-conductor company at Delhi. In 1977, after he completed his post-graduation in Ohio, USA, he joined NCR Corporation.  From here, he went on to join Intel where he worked on the development of the Pentium processor which earned him the name of Father of Pentium.  He was also the co-inventor of Intel’s flash memory technology. For his innovations and hard-work he was awarded the post of vice-president at Intel’s micro processor group.

In 1995, he resigned from Intel to work at NexGen, a startup which was taken over by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD). He also worked on launching K6 which was termed to be the –Pentium Killer.

Dham is currently working as the managing director of Indo US Venture Partners, India based fund founded by him.

Shantanu Narayen

Shantanu Narayen

Course: Master of Science in Computer Science

Institute: Bowling Green State University

Shantanu Narayen joined the Osmania University to pursue bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering. He also possesses an MBA degree from University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in computer science from Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

Narayen started his career by joining Apple Computer Inc. after which he held the post of director at Silicon Graphics. He then co-founded a firm called Pictra Inc which was the first to popularise the concept of sharing photographs on the Internet.

In 1998, Narayen joined Adobe as senior vice-president of worldwide product research. In 2005 he was promoted to the post of executive vice-president of worldwide products after which in 1997 he was appointed as the CEO of Adobe.

Explore More:

- IIT graduates who made it big

- Innovations by IIT & BITS Pilani students

- Satya Nadella appointed Microsoft CEO