Srikant became NCSA director in January 2026 after working in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also co-director of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute that is managed alongside the University of California, Berkeley.
Srikant earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Illinois and completed his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, communication networks, quantum computing and applied probability.
Srikant’s work on the mathematical analysis and design of algorithms for the internet, wireless networks and data centers has been recognized with major awards, including the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Field Award for Computers and Communications and the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. He is also a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and more than 25 of Srikant’s former students and post-docs are faculty members at leading institutions, including Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, Northwestern University, and the University of Texas at Austin, and several others hold executive and research and development positions at prestigious technology companies such as Nvidia, Amazon, Google and Meta.
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