Four Indian Americans elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Washington, May 14, 2015: Four Indian Americans - Sanjeev Arora, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Ravindran Kannan and Renu Malhotra - are among 197 new members of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a leading centre for independent policy research. The 2015 class includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Holland Cotter, singer-songwriter Judy Collins, Nike co-founder Philip Knight, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Kobilka, Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and novelist Tom Wolfe. Theoretical computer scientist Sanjeev Arora, who developed the PCP Theorem at Princeton University, is currently the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at the same institution. His research interests include computational complexity theory, uses of randomness in computation, probabilistically checkable proofs, computing approximate solutions to NP-hard problems, and geometric embeddings of metric spaces. Sangeeta N. Bhatia, 47, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was inducted on the merit of her investigative research into the application of micro- and nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration. Ravindran Kannan, 62, serves as a principal researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group.