Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Govinda Rajan

Raghuram Rajan is the current and the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.

Introduction:

  • Raghuram Rajan is born on 3rd february, 1963 in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.
  • He is a Tamil Brahmin & his father was a Senior Bureaucrat in Indian Government.
  • He is the current and the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, having taken charge of India’s central banking institution on 4 September 2013.
  • Rajan was chief economic adviser to India’s Ministry of Finance during the previous year and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2007.
  • He is on leave of absence as a professor of finance at the graduate business school at the University of Chicago.

Education:

  • He did his schooling from 7 grade to 12 grade in Delhi Public School, RK Puram.
  • He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1985.
  • He acquired a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1987.
  • He received a PhD in Management from the MIT in 1991 for his thesis titled “Essays on Banking”.

Industry Profile:

  • After graduation, He joined the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago as the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from October 2003 to December 2006.
  • In November 2008, Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh appointed Rajan as an honorary economic adviser.
  • Replacing Kaushik Basu, Rajan was appointed as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India on 10 August 2012.
  • In 2008, a high-level committee on financial reforms, headed by Rajan, submitted its final report to the Planning Commission.
  • He also prepared the Economic Survey for India for the year 2012-13, on 27 February.
  • On August 6, 2013 it was announced that Rajan would take over as the next RBI Governor.
  • He was appointed RBI Governor for a term of 3 years succeeding D Subbarao whose term ended on 4 September 2013.

Awards, Achievements & Recognitions:

  • In 2003, he won the Fischer Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association for contributions to the theory and practice of finance by an economist under age 40.
  • He was awarded the fifth Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics 2013 on 26 September 2013 for his “ground-breaking research work which influenced financial and macro-economic policies around the world”.
  • Few awards received by him in his illustrious career as an academician and a researcher in financial economics are as follows –
    1. Center for Financial Studies Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics, 2013
    2. Infosys Prize for the Economic Sciences, 2012
    3. Global Indian of the Year Award, NASSCOM, 2011
    4. Bernhard Harms Prize awarded by the Kiel Institute for International Economics 2010
    5. Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award, 2010
    6. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2009.
    7. Jensen prize (runner-up) for paper in Journal of Financial Economics, 2006
    8. Fama/DFA prize for best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics, 2003
    9. Inaugural Fisher Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association in January 2003
    10. Brattle Prize for distinguished paper in the Journal of Finance, 2002
    11. Brattle Prize for distinguished paper in the Journal of Finance, 2001
    12. Brattle Prize for distinguished paper in the Journal of Finance, 2000.
    13. Michael Brennan Award for the Best Paper published in the Review of Financial Studies,1997.
    14. Smith Breeden Prize awarded for best paper published in the Journal of Finance, 1994.
    15. Best Paper Award, Fifth Annual Small Firm Research Symposium, 1993.
    16. Smith Breeden Prize awarded for distinguished paper published in the Journal of Finance, 1992.
    17. Treffstz Prize for outstanding academic achievement, Western Finance Association, 1991.
    18. Gold Medal for academic performance, I.I.M (Ahmedabad), India, 1987.
    19. Director’s Gold Medal for all round performance in the class of 1985, I.I.T. (Delhi), 1985.

Social Life:

  • Raghuram is married to Radhika Puri, a classmate from IIM Ahmedabad. They have a son and a daughter.

LinkedIn Profile :

  • http://in.linkedin.com/pub/raghuram-rajan/46/366/846

Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai

P Sundarajan, better known as Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google.

Introduction:

  • Sundar Pichai was born in 1972 in Chennai.
  • He  earlier servied as Senior Vice President at Google, where he oversaw Android, Chrome and Google Apps.
  • “Pichai was the brightest of his batch & stood first in the department & went on to get the silver medal”, Says IIT Professor Sanat Kumar Roy.

Education:

  •  He received his Bachelors in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and was awarded an Institute Silver Medal.
  • He holds an M.S. from Stanford University.
  • An MBA degree holder from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Siebel Scholar.

Industry Profile:

  • He worked in Applied Materials & McKinsey Co.
  • Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004.
  • Sundar Pichai  is responsible for the development of the Google browser as the company’s Senior Vice President of product development.
  • On May 20, 2010, he announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google, and introduced the new video format WebM.
  • He has been a director at Jive Software since April 2011.
  • In 2011, Pichai’s product innovation skills caught Twitter’s attention. But, Google reportedly paid $50 million to keep him back.
  • On 13th March, 2013 Google CEO Larry Page Handed over android development to  Sundar Pichai.

Personal Life:

  • He is married & has two daughters.