Best Indian American

"The Golden Gate" is a 1986 novel written in verse by Indian author Vikram Seth. It explores the intertwined lives, relationships, and struggles of a group of young professionals living in San Francisco during the 1980s. The entire work is composed of nearly 600 Pushkin sonnets, utilizing fourteen-l...

Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American computer scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a pioneer in computer vision, best known for his foundational research in image segmentation, contour detection, and object recognition. His co-authored Normalized Cuts algorithm be...

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is an Indian historian of the early modern period whose research connects the histories of South Asia, Europe, and the wider Indian Ocean world. He is associated with the method of connected histories, which examines interactions and shared processes across political and cultural...

Raj Chetty is an Indian-born American economist at Harvard University whose research focuses on public economics, inequality, taxation, education, and social mobility. He is known for combining large administrative datasets with empirical research designs to measure how childhood location, family ci...

Abhijit Banerjee is an Indian-American economist at MIT who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize for pioneering the use of randomized controlled trials to evaluate anti-poverty interventions in developing countries.

Madhu Sudan is an Indian-American computer scientist at Harvard University, previously at MIT, whose work spans theoretical computer science, coding theory, and probabilistic proof systems. He made foundational contributions to list decoding of error-correcting codes and to the probabilistically che...

Narinder Singh Kapany was an Indian-American physicist whose research helped establish the principles and practical uses of fiber optics. His experiments demonstrated that light could be transmitted through bundles of fine glass fibers, supporting later developments in communications, imaging, and m...

Rajeev Motwani was a professor of computer science at Stanford University whose research spanned randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms, online algorithms, and web search. He co-authored the textbook 'Randomized Algorithms' (1995) with Prabhakar Raghavan and mentored Larry Page and Sergey B...

Avinash Dixit is an Indian-born American economist whose research covers international trade, industrial organization, game theory, political economy, and investment under uncertainty. With Joseph Stiglitz, he developed the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition, which explains markets con...

Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian and theorist whose work connects South Asian history with postcolonial theory and global historical analysis. His 2000 book Provincializing Europe argues that European historical categories cannot be treated as universal standards for interpreting all societ...

Umesh Vazirani is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is recognized for foundational contributions to quantum computing, including the 1993 paper with Ethan Bernstein that introduced the complexity class BQP and the Bernstein-Vazi...

Mihir Bellare is a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego. He is known for co-developing the random oracle model with Phillip Rogaway, providing a widely used methodology for analyzing the security of cryptographic schemes. His contributions span both symmetric and...

Mansi Kasliwal is an Indian-American astronomer and a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Her research focuses on the study of transient astronomical events, such as supernovae and kilonovae, which are bright flashes of light caused by stellar explosions or me...

Chandra Kumar Naranbhai Patel is an Indian-American electrical engineer and physicist who invented the carbon dioxide laser in 1964 while working at Bell Laboratories. The CO2 laser he developed was groundbreaking because it was the first continuous-wave laser capable of producing high power with re...

Prabhakar Raghavan is an Indian-American computer scientist known for his research in algorithms, randomized methods, and information retrieval. He co-authored the textbook 'Randomized Algorithms' with Rajeev Motwani and has held senior leadership roles at Yahoo Research and Google. His academic wor...

Venkatesan Guruswami is a computer scientist specializing in coding theory, computational complexity, and algorithms. His work with Madhu Sudan on list-decodable codes advanced error-correcting code theory by showing how to decode beyond the traditional error-correction radius. Guruswami serves as a...

Ananya Roy is a scholar of urban studies, geography, and international development whose work examines poverty, displacement, housing, and urban inequality. At the University of California, Los Angeles, she directs the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and holds academic appointments connected w...

Vijay Vazirani is a computer scientist who works on approximation algorithms, matching theory, and algorithmic game theory. He co-developed algorithms for finding maximum matchings in graphs and wrote the textbook "Approximation Algorithms." Vazirani's work has helped establish approximation algorit...

Chitranjan Ranawat is an Indian-American orthopedic surgeon associated with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. His clinical and research work has focused on reconstructive surgery of the hip and knee, including total joint replacement techniques and prosthetic implant design. He is known...

V. S. Ramachandran is an Indian-born neuroscientist known for research in behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He studied phantom limbs, body representation, synesthesia, and neurological conditions using relatively simple experimental methods. He...

Nalini Ambady (1959-2013) was an Indian-American social psychologist known for research on nonverbal behavior, interpersonal perception, and what she termed thin slices of expressive behavior. Her studies examined how observers can sometimes form meaningful judgments from very brief samples of condu...

Sendhil Mullainathan is an American economist and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow who currently teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a prominent figure in behavioral economics, researching how cognitive biases and resource deprivation affect human decision-making. He co-authored the 2...

Prasad Raghavendra is a theoretical computer scientist and professor at UC Berkeley. He is best known for proving that semidefinite programming relaxations, combined with rounding schemes, achieve the best possible approximation ratios for all constraint satisfaction problems assuming the Unique Gam...

Pankaj Agarwal is a Duke University professor known for range searching, geometric approximation algorithms, and co-authoring the comprehensive text Davenport-Schinzel Sequences and Their Geometric Applications.

Kunal Talwar is a computer scientist who has worked at Microsoft Research and Google, making significant theoretical contributions to differential privacy and its applications. His research includes developing improved mechanisms for releasing high-dimensional statistical data while preserving priva...

Viral Acharya is an Indian-American economist who serves as the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University's Stern School of Business. His academic research focuses heavily on banking regulation, corporate finance, and the measurement and mitigation of syst...

Richa Nagar is a feminist geographer and scholar at the University of Minnesota whose work addresses gender, migration, development, and social justice. Her research has involved South Asia and East Africa and is distinguished by collaborative, multilingual, and postcolonial approaches to knowledge...

Kailash C. Sahu is an Indian-American astrophysicist working at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He specializes in the study of gravitational microlensing, utilizing observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope to observe celestial objects. Sahu is notably recognized for leading...

Indian-ish is a 2019 cookbook by Priya Krishna, written with Ritu Krishna and inspired by the food cooked in their Indian American household. Its recipes combine Indian ingredients and techniques with the practical improvisations of American home cooking, including dishes such as roti pizza and saag...