Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering at Silicon Valley. He author of Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back; The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future; The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent; and of Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology. He has been a globally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and held appointments at Duke University, Stanford Law School, Emory University, and Singularity University.

Professor Wadhwa is based in Silicon Valley and researches exponentially advancing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances–in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials–are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security. They will also disrupt industries and create many new policy, law, and ethics issues.

In 2012, the U.S. Government awarded Wadhwa distinguished recognition as an “Outstanding American by Choice”, for his “commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans”. He was also named one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine in that year; in June 2013, he was on TIME magazine’s list of “Tech 40”, one of forty of the most influential minds in tech; and in September 2015, he was second on a list of “ten men worth emulating” in The Financial Times.

Wadhwa is also a contributor to VentureBeat, The Huffington Post, LinkedIn Influencers blog, and the American Society of Engineering Education’s Prism magazine. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies.