Anant Agarwal

In 2013, he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.

Agarwal received the 2001 Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architecture. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2011 he was appointed Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2013, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was appointed the CEO of EdX. In March 2016, he was awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education in higher education as an outstanding leader of the development of the Massive Open Online Course movement. In addition to that, he is also a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras. He received Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India in 2017. In 2018, he received the Yidan Prize for Education Research, the world's largest education award, i.e. USD four million.

Agarwal was born in Mangalore and did his schooling in St. Aloysius Mangalore. He holds a bachelor's degree (1982) in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. For postgraduate study, he attended Stanford University, where he received an MS (1984) and a PhD (1987), both in electrical engineering. His PhD thesis, Analysis of Cache Performance for Operating Systems and Multiprogramming, was written under John L. Hennessy.