India / US: Tech Collaboration 2.0

India and the U.S. have robust technology connections that are likely to increase substantially as a result of both the international situation and the increasingly global nature of technology. Our panelists will explore the roots and the potential paths forward of these developments.

You are invited to join a webinar moderated by Malav Shroff (India & St Peter's 1998), with panelists: Aarthi Anand (India & Harris Manchester 2003), Roy Bahat (New York & Lincoln 1998), Amba Kak (India & Mansfield 2014), Anita Mehta (India & St Catherine's 1978) and Raman Nanda (India & Green 1996) and Varun Sivaram (California & St John's 2011)

Time: Thursday 27 June, 4PM (UK), 8AM (PT), 11AM (ET), 8:30PM (IT)

Location: Zoom

This conversation, which will be held on Zoom, is hosted in partnership with the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholars in India. The event is open to all Rhodes Scholars and Oxonian members of AARS. Space may be limited for this Zoom event, so please register early.

Aarthi Anand (India & Harris Manchester 2003) is one of the few lawyers qualified to practice law in California, New York, England & Wales, and India. She grew up in India and the Rhodes Scholarship opened the pathway to pursuing a global legal career. After studying law at Oxford, Aarthi has been practicing law in New York for twenty years. Aarthi counsels financial institutions and global technology companies on M&A and financing transactions, incl. Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware, Meta’s divestiture of Giphy, and $1.96 billion financing of GoDaddy. She specializes in AI, digital assets, and NFTs, and has worked on Meta’s Diem, JPM Coin and the most significant cryptocurrency initiatives. She has also assisted wall street banks and global technology corporations to consider the implications of AI on financial services and to comply with banking regulations. Aarthi has also published empirical studies comparing the technology industries in the US and India and serving on this panel resonates deeply at both the professional and personal level.

Roy Bahat (New York & Lincoln 1998) is the head of Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture firm backed by Bloomberg LP that was the first venture capital fund to focus on the future of work, and also the first to focus on artificial intelligence. Roy was a commissioner on the California Governor’s Future of Work Commission. He was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, has served in government, and led a non-profit in addition to his work at established corporations and day zero start-ups. He serves on the board or as an advisor to several nonprofits including Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and the Economic Security Project. Roy graduated from Harvard College, where he ran the student public service non-profit, and Oxford University. He also serves on the faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Amba Kak (India & Mansfield 2014) is a leading technology policy strategist and researcher with over a decade of experience working in multiple regions and in roles across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Amba serves as Executive Director of AI Now. Previously, Amba was Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission. She served as Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Signal Foundation and the Program Committee for the Board of Directors for the Mozilla Foundation.

Anita Mehta (India & St Catherine's 1978) is a theoretical physicist of complex systems. She pioneered the physics of granular media, for which she was recognised by a Fellowship of the American Society; and went on to work on subjects ranging from the physics of long- and short-term memory, through models of risk and the sociophysics of influence, to models of speech perception in the presence of mishearings. The latter, as well as research on linguistic competition, were the fruit of her return to Oxford as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Linguistics in 2018, to which her affiliation continues.

The second Indian woman Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, she was India’s first Radcliffe Fellow to Harvard, where, among other things, her interest in science policy was rekindled by her association with the Belfer Centre. She was later chosen to serve as the Indian Science Ambassador to the US for the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, where her brief was to connect scientists with complementary interests in India and the US.

She has always emphasised the applications of her own research to the real world, and more generally, sought to link blue sky research to its applications in technology, which has been fed by her experiences of consulting with organisations such as IBM and Schlumberger.

An internationally visible physics researcher, her work has taken to most countries in Europe, across the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, as well as Singapore, Israel, the UAE and Turkey. She has given about two hundred talks, both to fellow academics and the general public (details of which can be found in https://www.academia.edu/42772456/CV). She speaks English, Hindi, Bengali, French and Gujarati with native fluency, and can get by in Spanish and Italian. Her other interests include western classical music and writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

Raman Nanda (India & Green 1996) is based in Silicon Valley and works on Energy at SoftBank. Previously, Raman founded SoftBank's international renewables arm in 2015, developing one of the World's largest $ multi-billion portfolios of solar & wind power plants, and then led energy investing at SoftBank Investment Advisers. Raman has been managing SoftBank's global energy investments since it was first established, in 2011, right after the Fukushima Earthquake. Before that, in 2008, he had set up his own solar company, e10Six, to develop grid-scale solar projects in India. Prior to this, Raman worked in New York, first at McKinsey & Co (`01‐`05) and then at Acumen Fund as CFO (‘06-‘07), responsible for a multi-national and rapidly expanding investment portfolio. Raman has a PhD from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is an avid triathlete.

Varun Sivaram (St John's & California 2011) is a physicist, clean energy executive, and former U.S. diplomat with experience spanning the corporate, policy, and academic sectors. He has served as Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Ørsted, a leading renewable energy company with the world’s largest offshore wind energy portfolio, and previously served in the U.S. Biden-Harris administration as the managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to Secretary John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, where he created the First Movers Coalition. He has also served as Chief Technology Officer of ReNew Power Limited, a multi-billion dollar renewable-energy firm that is India's largest; on the faculty of Columbia University and Georgetown University; as director of the energy program at the Council on Foreign Relations; and as senior energy advisor to the Los Angeles Mayor and New York Governor. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world, MIT Technology Review named him one of the top 35 innovators under 35, and the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. His books include "Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet," "Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission," and "Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems." He serves on the board of the Atlantic Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.

Moderator: Malav Shroff (India & St Peter's 1998) is an entrepreneur having served in multiple industries. He completed his DPhil in Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and worked in McKinsey and Co, New York. He participated in the Olympic Games 2004 in Sailing. He is President of the Asian Sailing Federation.

Register:

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Q & A:

Please feel free to submit any questions in advance to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk or you can use the chat function within Zoom to ask questions directly during the live event.