Lav Varshney, Ph.D.

Bio: Lav Varshney is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company using novel human-integrated AI in social music co-creativity platforms to enhance human wellbeing across society, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment.  He is a former White House staffer, having just served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. 

Previously at IBM Research, he led the development and deployment of the Chef Watson system for culinary creativity as the first commercially successful generative AI technology, which also received worldwide acclaim.  At Salesforce Research, he was part of the team that open-source released the largest and most capable large language model at the time.  His work and public scholarship has been featured in media ranging from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, NPR, Slate, and The New Yorker.  He has appeared in the Robert Downey, Jr. documentary series, Age of AI. 

He holds a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His current research interests include artificial intelligence foundations, explainability, and governance; agent-based policymaking; and AI applications in health and well-being.