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.