BITSAA International Inc. is a not-for-profit organization registered in New Jersey, USA (Federal EIN# 22-3835037) on October 12, 2001.

BITSAA International was founded to engage in charitable and educational activities by raising funds for setting up endowments, creating scholarships, rewarding teaching and research and generally promoting the development of resources at Birla Institute of Technology and Science campuses.

BITSAA International Founders

Anupendra Sharma ('87)- Founder, BITSAA International Anupendra grew up in Delhi, and attended BITS Pilani from 1987 to 1992, graduating with a Masters in Economics and Bachelors in Instrumentation Engineering. BITS, was a life-changing personal experience for Anupendra, and he got involved with many team and leadership-based based initiatives, in most cases lacking in talent but never in enthusiasm. He took part in the Hindi and English Drama Club, Music club, and was part of winning choreography and fashion parade competitions during Oasis. Anupendra ventured to bring Blitzkreig, a Delhi-based heavy band to play on campus through a Rock Club he co-founded. Read more about Anupendra>>

Venu Palaparthi

Sandeep Arora

BITSAA International Leaders

Prasad Thammineni

Anand Rajaram

Suraj Srinivasan

Prasenjit Chaudhari

Vinod Agarwal

Santhana Satagopan

Laxman Mohanty

Karthik Krishna

Buvana Dayananda

Ashok Roy

BITSAA Chapter Leaders

Jayan Ramankutty	Founding President, Silicon Valley Chapter
Krishnaraj Inbarajan

Project BITSConnect Leaders

Anita Agrawal	Prof J.P Misra
BP Agrawal	Subodh Mittal
Vinod Agrawal	Venu Palaparthi
Sandeep Arora	Pankaj Patel
Dr Rahul Banerjee	Anand Rajaram
Shyamoli Banerjee	Jayan Ramankutty
Hitesh Bhatnagar	Deepu Rathi
Ashish Bhinde	Rohit Sah
Mukul Chawla	Vikram Shah
Satish Gupta	Anupendra Sharma
Prem Jain	Mani Sundaram
Roop Jain	Prashant Vishwanathan
Karthik Krishna	Yogesh Vaidya (STG)
Raj Khare

Ashish Garg ('97)- Chief Executive Officer (2008-10) Ashish is a Strategic Marketing Manager at Cypress Semiconductor. Ashish has worked with BITSAA for four years at different positions including Chief Editor, BITSAA Sandpaper 2.0 (Alumni Magazine), Secretary of the BITSAA Silicon Valley Chapter as well as a volunteer for Project BITSConnect. Ashish created on-campus BITSAA teams at the Pilani and Goa campuses as well as the first Cypress PSoC lab in India at the BITS Pilani Goa campus. Ashish is an Instruite from the almost-famous 1997 batch of BITS Pilani. At BITS, Ashish was member Election Commission, member Department of Controls, Instru APOGEE co-ord and President, Sangam. Incidentally, he also holds an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sarath Kolla ('93) - Chief Technology Officer(2006-10) Sarath is an independent Software Consultant providing technology services to Insurance and Finance companies. He served as a Product Development Architect at Netkey (Kiosk and Digital Signage Solutions provider), SupplyInsight (RFID Solutions provider) and Metaserver (Business Process Workflow Middleware Provider). His expertise includes providing Vision and outlining Technology Roadmap for complex products and applications. He graduated from BITS, Pilani in 1998 with a B.E. in Computer Science and M.Sc in Biological Sciences. Sarath holds a Masters degree in Computer Science at University of Denver, Colorado, USA in 2000. He lives in CT, USA with his wife (Meghna) and son (Yug Sai). His passions include playing VolleyBall, Cricket, Tennis and Table Tennis.

Krishna Hegde ('96) - Chief Finance Officer (2008-2009) Krishna works in the credit strategy team at Barclays Capital, New York. Before joining Barclays, Krishna handled a similar role at Lehman Brothers. He earned his MBA (with distinction) from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in 2006 and was an Edward Tuck scholar. From BITS, he joined Hindustan Unilever as a Business Leadership Trainee and subsequently worked as an IT manager handling business intelligence systems for sales and supply chain. At Pilani, he did his BE (Hons) in Computer Science and his ID number was 96A7PS034. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Priya. Krishna co-founded BITS2Bschool and coordinated the public-relations efforts within India for BITSConnect.

Nikhil Kolar ('96) - Chief Operations Officer (2008 - 2009) Nikhil is a Senior Product Manager for Windows Live Search with Microsoft Corp. Previously, Nikhil was an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton in the Operations & Strategy practice at their Cleveland Office. At Booz Allen, Nikhil has worked on a number of operations and growth related projects in the auto, consumer, energy and healthcare industries. Nikhil has also worked at Amazon.com as an Operations Manager. Back in India, Nikhil worked for Celstream Technologies in Bangalore, developing embedded applications for Xerox color printers. At BITS, Nikhil was part of the election commission in addition to being the CompSci Co-ord for APOGEE'99. Nikhil holds an MBA (with University Honors) from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon (2005) and completed his BE (Honors) Computer Science from BITS, Pilani (2000). Nikhil lives in Seattle with his wife, Reema, who is also from BITS, Pilani.

Ramakrishnan Lakshminarasimhan (’96) – Director, Fundraising (2008-2009) Ram (aka Punra) is a Lead Architect at AT&T and designs software solutions for the entertainment and wireless businesses. At BITS, Ram was a Compsci-ite, a member of Dept of Controls and a backstage member of Tamil Drama Club. Before joining AT&T, he earned his MS from University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the co-founder and President of his high school alumni association. He has worked with BITSAA as a Coordinator for the BITS2MSPHD team since 2005. He is a fundraiser for ASHA, Chicago and a Project Coordinator for Yuva Foundations, a BITSian educational non-profit venture. Ram is interested in educational charity work and running. His favorite pastime is to train for marathons in the suburbs of Chicago.

Karthik Subramanian('01) - Director, Human Resources (2008-2009) Karthik Narayanan Subramanian, fondly known as KaNa, is a 2001 batch Instruite from the BITS Pilani campus. After completing his Bachelors degree he went on to work at Texas Intruments, Bangalore for an year. He then pursued his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and currently works for Ambarella Corp. in the San Francisco bay area as a Design Engineer. KaNa has been involved with BITSAA in a variety of volunteer roles and has been a moderator for BITS2MSPHD. His leisure time activities mainly revolve around keeping in touch with BITS, Pilani and BITSians.

Sandhya Krishnan (’99) – Director, Communications (2008 - 2009) Sandhya spent most of her time at Pilani with the Department of Controlz, Mime Club and EDC. After a brief stint as a techie, she set her sights on the ever-shiny MBA. At XLRI Jamshedpur, she led the PR team acting as an interface between the press, the alumni, the industry and the school, notching up media exposure. These days, Sandhya lives in Pittsburgh with her husband (also a BITSian) and works for Deloitte Consulting. When not glued to Food Network or food, she writes. Sandhya has been with Sandpaper since 2005 and is on the Editorial Team.

Dileepan Narayanan ('00) - Chief Editor, Sandpaper 2.0 (2008-2009) Dileepan is currently working with Cypress Semiconductor as a Quality Manager. He completed Mechanical Engineering at BITS, Pilani in 2004 and Industrial Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 2006. His interests are cricket, billiards (among other sports), literature and poetry. At BITS, he was the Sports Secretary in 2003 and was a part of the cricket team and ELAS. He has served in the Sandpaper team since 2004.

Rakesh Anugula (’02) – Vice President, Campus Relations (2008-2009) Rakesh is currently working as Assistant Manager in Citi Group Advanced Analytical Solutions, Bangalore. While at Pilani, Rakesh was Hostel Representative for year 2003-’04 and General Secretary of BITS Students’ Union for the year 2004-’05. During his tenure, Rakesh started several initiatives like Student Faculty Discussion Forums, negotiated with UGC to approve UGC scholarships for certain ME disciplines which were not recognized earlier, launched a web portal for Students Union and initiated the Department of Networking. Rakesh also doubled the BITSian’s participation in other fests by increasing the budgets for travel grants. Rakesh was one of the two students nominated from Indian Universities to the Confederation of Indian Industry in 2005. Rakesh also founded Nirmaan, a social organization at Pilani in his 3rd year which focused on providing education and livelihood opportunities to the rural unprivileged in villages around Pilani. Bubbling energy, enthusiasm and generosity of BITSians has taken Nirmaan to eight different locations in India with approximately 750 volunteers, 500 BITSians and 250 non BITSians and is currently benefiting around 5000 people. Rakesh graduated from BITS, Pilani with M.M.S and M.Sc (Tech) Finance in 2007. He received the ‘Karthikeyan Award’ presented to the best all-rounder student of Management Association. Rakesh’s passions are Humanity, Indian Polity & Public Policy, Innovation in Public Governance and Entrepreneurship.

Yashveer Singh ('04) – Manager, Campus Relations (2008-2009) Yashveer Singh works with Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit organisation focused on improving governance in India, through a combination of political advocacy, research, grass-roots mobilisation, and civic training. Born and brought up in rural Rajasthan, he graduated with MSc. (Hons) Economics from BITS, Pilani. Prior to Janaagraha, he led a rural entrepreneurship initiative to develop appropriate marketing strategies and income-generation projects for rural communities. In his earlier engagement with Infosys, he worked as a Software Engineer. His six months internship at National Stock Exchange of India (Mumbai), gave him a broad insight about Indian economy and financial markets. At BITS, he served student community in various capacities like Sports Secretary Marudhara association, Hostel representative and President Student’s Union Council. As President of Student’s Union he was involved in various initiatives like preparing VISION-2020 plan for the institute, Internationalization and bringing interdisciplinary working model for Apogee, inviting the then President of India, Dr. A. P. J Abdul kalam to campus, Systemizing the participation of BITSians in cultural and technical festivals of other institutes, guiding and supporting Goa Campus in club and department formations at initial stages, Strengthening Student Faculty discussion forums, reviving interbhawan cultural festival and starting the Nescafe Corner inside Meera Bhawan He enjoys reading and playing basketball and is enthusiastic about Innovation in Public policy and governance. Yashveer is passionate about development of India and contributes by promoting Social Entrepreneurship.

Ganesh Venkataraman('95) - Director, BITSAA OLAB (2008-2009) Ganesh (or Ganja as he was known in BITS) is currently a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Magma Design Automation. After a brief stint at Cypress Semiconductor, Bangalore, Ganesh completed his MS from the University of Iowa and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. He has published several papers related to VLSI Design/CAD and algorithms. Ganesh was the President of the Association for India’s Development (AID-India) at Texas A&M. Under his leadership AID-TAMU raised over $12,000 which was spent in grass root level development projects in India. His passions include long distance running, hiking and outdoors. At BITS, he acted and directed in as many as eight PTM plays and was a member of the PTM executive committee. He currently lives in San Jose, California.

Arun Maharajan (’99) – Manager, Communications (2008-2009) I am supposed to give a short "bio" of myself...hmmm...where do I start? I am not too sure...hmmm...am debating between the possibility of making this one of my humorous pieces of text where I might say something like "It took me almost 20 years of living on this world until I could actually acknowledge it...BITS helped me do that...I wrote my first "Hello World!" program (which didn’t dump the crash or whatever) at BITS...and thus started a wonderfully memorable time!". Or I am thinking whether I should make one of those very official sounding bios like "After graduating from BITS with my Electronics and Instrumentation degree, I worked for a couple of years in Bangalore before I went to Germany to complete my master’s degree in Automotive Engineering. I am currently based in south Germany working as an all-rounder in the field of Automotive Control Systems and Mechatronics." So...what will it be...hmmm...I think I better talk about why I am actually a part of BITSAA. In brief, I am passionate enough about BITS to want to give something back to it and I am hoping that being part of BITSAA might enable that. I have been part of the Sandpaper team for a while and also as part of the Newsletter team. Hoping to contribute much more here.

Ram Katuri('92)- Director, Finance (2008-2009) Ram holds a bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from BITS Pilani. Ram has recently completed his M.B.A from The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (Chicago GSB) and he is joining McKinsey & Company's New Jersey office. Prior to this, he held several leadership and management positions at large scale organizations in his 13 years of progressive experience in IT. His other interests include volunteering in non-profits and getting his hands dirty in Golf and Tennis.

Bhargav Addala (’02) – Advisor, Global Meet Team (2008-2009) Bhargav is an Applications engineer in the E-Business Suite group at Oracle Corp. USA and is based in the Bay Area. Bhargav has been involved with BITSAA as a moderator of Bits2MsPhd for more than a year now as well as being an active participant in BITSAA Silicon Valley Chapter initiatives. At BITS, Bhargav was a member of the Corroboration and Review Committee (C.R.C.), a member of the Election Commission panel and a member of the Department of Photography. He completed his Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (2008) and his B.E.(Hons.) Mechanical Engineering from BITS, Pilani (2006).

Sudip Dutta ('95) - President BITS.aid(2008-10) Sudip is the Director Sales at Persistent Systems. He has close to 10+ years of combined experience in the management of technology based efforts and sales. He has worked in different roles including sales and optimizing the sales tracking process in a multi-billion dollar organization. He is currently managing, cross selling and up selling into clients in USA, China, Taiwan. He was one on the top sales executives with Larsen & Toubro, involving direct sales. At Infosys Technologies Limited, Sudip managed several high profile engineering teams. Sudip has been engaged with BITS in various roles.He is the President of BITS.aid the volunteering arm of his alma mater BITS, Pilani India. Sudip was the Jt. Secretary of the BITSAA Bangalore chapter. At BITS, Sudip was a member of Art 'n Decor, was elected the 3rd year representative of the Mech Engineering Association and was an editorial member of the annual Mech Eng "Horse Power". He was awarded the runnersup award at "APOGEE" for a paper presented on Artificial Intelligence and has won couple of awards at BOSM and OASIS.