I graduated from Harvard in 1997 and then joined a startup company in the bay area for a few years. I then left to work on a PhD at MIT. My PhD thesis, supervised by Silvio Micali, studied three aspects of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs.

After PhD, I worked at the Zurich IBM Research Lab. In Fall 2007, I joined the faculty in the CS department at U. of Virginia in Charlottesville. I was promoted to Associate professor (tenure) in 2013. In 2016, I moved to Northeastern University, and was finally promoted to Professor in 2021. (Hint: If you move to a new university near your promotion boundary, I suggest negotiating on this point to avoid delays.)

I’ve received the NSF Career award, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, the FEST fellowship, an Amazon Research award, an SAIC research award, a Jacobs Future of Money research prize, a Google Faculty Research Award, and the 2016 U of Virginia Professor of the year award by the student ACM chapter.

I have three children with my partner and acclaimed architectural historian Cammy Brothers.

People wonder why I write my name in lower-case. There is no deep reason other than it was a habit I picked up in elementary school while learning to write cursive. I’m not picky about it, so take license and write it how you prefer.

My aunt is the celebrated Gujurati author, Himanshi Shelat, and my brother Anang runs a pediatric cancer research group at St. Judes.