Lav R. Varshney
Lav
Varshney
Della Pietra Infinity Professor, Director

AI Innovation Institute
NCS 268
Stony Brook, NY 11794-2424

Phone

+1-631-632-1818

Interests

Artificial Intelligence, Information Theory, Statistical Signal Processing, Sociotechnical Systems, Neuroscience, Network Science, Creativity

Biography

Lav Varshney is the Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company building novel human-controllable AI for discovery and creativity, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. He holds appointments at RAND Corporation and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a visiting scholar at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research AI, and a research staff member at IBM Research.  He is a former White House staffer, having served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. His research interests include information theory and artificial intelligence. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell University and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Awards

White House Fellowship, 2022-2023
Healthy Longevity 2022 QuickFire Challenge, U.S. National Academy of Medicine, 2022
IEEE MICRO Top Pick, 2024
Best Short Paper Award, International Conference on Computational Creativity, 2025

Research

Lav’s research interests include information and coding theory, artificial intelligence, statistical signal processing, data science, sociotechnical systems, neuroscience, and creativity.