Speaker Biographies
Saurabh Srivastava
Saurabh Srivastava is one of India's leading IT entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He chairs and sits on the board of several companies including Xansa plc., a US $ 750 million IT company. Saurabh chairs Infinity, India's leading seed stage VC fund, as also the Indian Venture Capital Association and sits on the boards of the Indian government's National and several State Venture Capital Funds.
Saurabh is co-founder and past chairman of NASSCOM, President of TiE, Delhi and sits on the global board of TiE, the world's largest organization devoted to Entrepreneurs. Saurabh is the founder Chairman of NASSCOM Foundation, the community arm of NASSCOM. He is a trustee of the America India Foundation and a founding trustee of India Sponsor Foundation (ISF), a unique NGO, which seeks to catalyze change by bringing together NGOs, overseas donors and corporates.
He is on the Advisory Board of the Imperial College Business School, London, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at IIT, Mumbai and holds a masters degree from Harvard University, USA, and a Bachelor in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, which has also conferred on him the "Distinguished Alumnus" award.
Dr Devi Shetty
Dr. Devi Shetty, is a cardiac surgeon who began his career at Guys Hospital in London. Dubbed 'the Henry Ford of Heart Surgery' by the Wall Street Journal, for his pioneering model of low-cost health care at scale at Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City in Bangalore, his work has also been profiled Forbes, Fortune and Business Week.
Following his return to India in 1989, he started the BM Birla Heart Research Centre in Kolkata, where he was involved in the treatment of Mother Teresa. His involvement with Mother Teresa had a deep impact on him resulting in his becoming her disciple. Thereafter, he moved to Bangalore to commission the Manipal Heart Foundation. He founded a chain of super-specialty hospitals which includes the Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences in Kolkata and Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City in Bangalore.
Currently, Narayana Hrudayalaya Group of Hospitals establishes and manages existing and upcoming health cities across India. In association with the Indian Space Research Organization, the Group manages the world's largest telemedicine program and has treated over 53,000 heart patients. Narayana Hrudayalaya telemedicine facility caters to the PAN-African satellite network which connects 56 African cities.
Twenty years ago, Dr. Shetty and his team pioneered neo-natal cardiac surgery by operating on new born babies with complex congenital heart disease. In addition to his administrative and medical commitments with the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group, Dr. Shetty is also on the Board of Governors of the Medical Council of India, an apex body regulating medical education in India.
Dr. Shetty is a recipient of the Padma Shree in 2003, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003, Dr. B.C .Roy award in 2004 and Social Entrepreneur - World Economic Forum in 2005. Dr. Shetty is a Professor at Rajiv Gandhi University of Medical Sciences, Bangalore, India and University of Minnesota Medical School, USA.
Dr Balram Bhargava
Balram Bhargava is Professor of Cardiology at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi and also serves as the Executive Director for Stanford India Biodesign Centre. Professor (Dr) Balram Bhargava is an outstanding cardiologist, one of the foremost leaders in biomedical innovation, public health, medical education and medical research. He developed the indigenous Platinum Iridium coronary stent and has been instrumental in clinically evaluating Indian stents. These low cost indigenous stents have benefitted several thousand patients. He set up the Centre for Excellence for Stem Cell Studies, which has initiated treatment of patients with dilated cardiomyopathy for the first time in the world. This has benefitted number of no-option patients waiting on the cardiac transplant list.
He has promoted the India-Stanford Biodesign programme, a unique interdisciplinary programme to foster innovation, design in low cost implants/devices. This fellowship on Biomedical Technology Innovation and has led to over twenty patents on low cost medical devices. He is currently developing the Chest Compression Device for Sudden Cardiac Death patients; funded by the Wellcome Trust. He is providing leadership for creative disease prevention, early detection and transport system for sick cardiac patients. He is an innovator par excellence with innovations touching everyday lives for real impact. He has been awarded the SN Bose Centenary award by the Indian National Science Congress and National Academy of Sciences Platinum Jubilee Award, Tata Innovation Fellowship and Vasvik Award for Biomedical Technology Innovation.
Professor Jaideep Prabhu
Jaideep Prabhu is Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise and Director of the Centre for India and Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is author of Jugaad Innovation: think frugal, be flexible, generate breakthrough growth, currently on the Indian bestseller list. He has recently been awarded a mid-career fellowship from the UK's Advanced Institute for Management Research (AIM) to work on a large project on the innovation activities in India and China of the world's largest multinationals. His work has been profiled in BusinessWeek, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Times, The Financial Times, The Economic Times and Exec Digital among other publications in India, the UK, US and elsewhere.
Jaideep's research interests are in marketing, innovation, strategy and international business. In particular, he studies various cross-national issues concerning the antecedents and consequences of radical innovation in high-technology contexts such as e-commerce, banking, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. His most recent research is on the role of firm culture in driving innovation in firms across nations. This research also examines how multinational firms organize their innovation activities worldwide, the forces that drive their R&D location decisions and the factors that influence the performance implications of these decisions and the factors that influence the permance implications of decisions.
Prior to his current role, he was Professor of Marketing and Director of Research at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London; University Senior Lecturer in Marketing, the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge; Assistant Professor and Fellow at the Center for Economic Research, Tilburg University, the Netherlands; and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA. He has a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and a PhD from the University of Southern California. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and the Journal of Management Studies, and is on the senior advisory board of the European Journal of Marketing.
Professor Gerard Parr
Gerard Parr holds the Full Chair in Telecommunications Engineering and is a Member of the Computer Science Research Institute in the Faculty of Computing & Engineering at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. He holds a PhD in Self Stabilizing Protocols, aspects of which were completed with one of the founding Fathers of the Internet (Professor Jon Postel) as a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Southern California-USC Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles on US-DARPA funded research projects into Fault-Tolerant and Self-stabilizing Protocols.
Professor Parr has been instrumental in the development of a consortium of leading UK-India academia and industry (led by BT Innovate) to create the first India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC- http://www.iu-atc.com) of Excellence in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services. Phase 1 of this major 5-year initiative received initial funding and support to the tune of £9.2M in Spring 2009 from EPSRC, Indian-DST and the consortium partners. On 18th April 2012, the UK's Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, announced an additional £10 million funding boost for the project during a meeting with Indian Science and Technology Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in London. The initiative represents the largest ICT Research collaboration of its kind between UK and India.
Parr has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals. He has also been an invited guest editor on several prestigious titles including a Special Issue of the premier International Journal of Computer Networks which was devoted to Advances in Military Communications Technologies and Systems. He previously acted as the lead Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the Journal of Aerospace Computing Information and Communications in the area of First-Responder Technologies for the Global Aerospace Industry and was recently appointed Senior Guest Editor for the prestigious IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications-JSAC for a Special Issue on Communications Dynamics in Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles.
Professor Parr has extensive experience of managing government and industry-sponsored research contracts and has developed a close working relationship with a number of major ICT companies. He has attracted several £millions of external research and commercial funding and has advised governments on the allocation of funding to projects valued in total of approximately £650 million. In recent years he has been successful in attracting major EPSRC research funding for a project in Sensing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that will involves colleagues from University College London, University of Oxford, UK Home Office, Thales, BAE Systems and Boeing USA
He was invited to become a member of the Telecommunications Regulator in the Republic of Ireland (COMREG) Forward Looking Panel in the Republic of Ireland. He was appointed as Member of the Northern Ireland Advisory Committee for OFCOM UK (the telecommunications/media regulator) which reports to the main board of OFCOM. He acts as a Technical Expert Assessor for Science Foundation Ireland and is also a Technical Advisor for ICT to the UK government through Invest Northern Ireland.
Professor Parr is a member of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Expert Peer Review College, and was a past member of previous Large Grant Peer Review Panels. Parr was recently invited to become a Member of the UK Government Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ICT Strategic Advisory Team. Engaged in several global research partnerships, he has been appointed as an International Scientific Advisor to ETISALAT-BT Innovation Centre in UAE and in addition to supervising post graduate students is also an advisor at the UK EPSRC National Centre for Doctoral Training in Communications Engineering at the University of Bristol.
Professor Parr has recently been successful during April 2012 with colleagues form Southampton, Queen Mary London and Nottingham in attracting another major grant from the EPSRC Digital Economy Programme to establish a Research Network for "IT as a Utility". For further details contact gp.parr@ulster.ac.uk.
Mark Sinclair leads the Science & Innovation Network for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in India. This team of nine consultants spread across three Indian cities serves science interests across the whole of the UK government. They respond to emerging science and policy priorities and aim to facilitate new scientific partnerships and catalyse the early stages of new collaborations. They encourage, promote and facilitate R&D collaborations between academia, research establishments and businesses in the UK and their Indian partners. Mark is responsible for strategy and direction of the network in India and focuses on the government to government aspects of the Indo-UK science relationship. Mark has had an extensive career in science and technology across a number of UK Government departments, having worked in research, programme management, science policy, and as private secretary to the Defence Chief Scientific Adviser. Prior to arriving in India Mark led the Science and Innovation Network in Europe West, based in Paris, and before that led the S&I Network in Boston, USA. Mark has degrees in engineering and an MBA.
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