Vijay Chandru

Professor Vijay Chandru is a visiting scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and the Centre for Brain Research in Bengaluru, India and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, USA. He earned his PhD in the mathematics of decision sciences (operations research) from MIT in 1982, taught as a tenured professor at Purdue University and the Indian Institute of Science. He was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1996, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2024 for contributions to theoretical computer science, computational biology and technology for social good. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Strand Life Sciences, a pioneering genomics-based precision medicine solutions company, and CRISPRBITS, a CRISPR platform company in India. Vijay was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and is an advisor to the state and the national governments of India on technology innovation in science and healthcare. He has been closely engaged with advocacy for patient communities in India with rare genetic disorders and personally drives the mission "No Disease Orphan -2030." As a commissioner of the recent Lancet Citizens’ Commission on the reimagining of India’s health systems (2020-2025), Vijay co-chaired the technology workstream and is a co-author of the final report.