Varshney Named Inaugural Director of Stony Brook AI Innovation Institute
After a national search, Stony Brook University will welcome Lav Varshney as the inaugural director of the campuswide Artificial Intelligence Innovation Institute, or AI3. Varshney, a cutting-edge researcher in artificial intelligence and its applications, will also hold the inaugural Della Pietra Infinity chair.
Varshney comes to Stony Brook from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also held affiliations in computer science, neuroscience, industrial and enterprise systems engineering, digital agriculture, and personalized nutrition, as well as the Institute of Government and Public Affairs.
“Lav exemplifies the ethos and vision of Stony Brook’s AI3. He is committed to working across disciplines to find actionable solutions that will have a meaningful, positive impact on society,” said Carl W. Lejuez, executive vice president and provost. “Under his leadership, the institute will serve to empower the entire university community and beyond, catalyzing core AI research, curriculum innovation, and societal change in the ever-evolving landscape of knowledge work. I am pleased to welcome him to the university.”
As director, Varshney will build on work begun by a committee of more than 40 faculty and staff who helped develop the initial plans for AI3. He will leverage their work to set the research direction for AI3 and facilitate innovative interdisciplinary collaboration across the university. His leadership will build on the university’s role as a core partner in Empire AI, New York State’s $250 million investment in AI and computing. He will also support further collaborations with industry and identify unexplored research areas.
Varshney’s background blends work in industry, academia, government, think tanks and national laboratories.
His research interests include artificial intelligence foundations, applications, ethics and policy; information theory, statistical signal processing and network science; and technology innovation, scientific discovery and creativity.
In addition to his role at Illinois, he is a visiting scholar at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and has appointments at RAND Corporation and Brookhaven National Lab. He is the chief scientist at Ensaras, a company that uses AI to automate and improve the efficiency of wastewater and waste-to-value systems, and the CEO and co-founder of Kocree, an AI start-up focused on lowering the bar to music creativity and enabling people to monetize their creativity. He was a White House Fellow, often called the nation’s most prestigious program for leadership and public service; he served on the National Security Council staff from 2022-2023 and contributed to national and international AI policy as well as broader technology policy.
He was previously a researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he led the design and deployment of the first commercially successful generative AI technology, and a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research AI, where he was part of the team that open-weight released the first billion-parameter large language model.
The appointment of the Della Pietra Infinity Chair was made possible by generous gifts from the Stephen Della Pietra and Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra Family Foundation and the Della Pietra Foundation.
“We are honored to have created the Della Pietra Infinity Chair and excited to welcome Lav Varshney to advance the field of artificial intelligence here at Stony Brook University. The Infinity Chair appointment represents a newly designed, prestigious endowed position awarded to faculty whose teaching and research have markedly advanced their fields of study,” said Stony Brook Foundation Trustee Stephen Della Pietra.
Stony Brook Foundation Trustee Vincent Della Pietra further noted: “We are thrilled to have someone as distinguished as Lav Varshney to this new appointed leadership role — one we were proud to help shape. Varshney will be an exceptional ambassador for this esteemed endowed chair, identified by our incoming president, Andrea Goldsmith, as a key area for Stony Brook’s future. With a focus on groundbreaking AI research, this position is intended to spark interdisciplinary collaboration and strengthen emerging and established fields for decades to come.”
Varshney is the recipient of grants from government agencies including DARPA, ARPA-E, NSF, Army, Air Force, and the US Departments of Agriculture and Energy, as well as from the National Academy of Medicine and from private industry including IBM, Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA and Google.
He has authored or co-authored more than 300 papers in top conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR, as well as peer-reviewed journals including Neuron, Physical Review, Management Science, Communications of the ACM, Nature Food, SIAM Journal on Applied Algebra and Geometry, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Neurosurgery and several IEEE journals.
In addition to his research, Varshney has advised 14 master’s and doctoral students and mentored more than 30 undergraduate students. He is currently advising another 10 doctoral students. He was the faculty advisor for Illinois’ chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, which won the outstanding chapter award three years in a row. He has taught electrical and computer engineering at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and co-taught an interdisciplinary course designed to give students perspectives on engineering from literature and humanities.
Varshney is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi. He is a senior member of IEEE, was a founding member of the IEEE Special Interest Group on Big Data in Signal Processing and served on the Shannon Centenary Committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He served on the advisory board of the AI Prize, given by the XPRIZE Foundation, a nonprofit that runs global competitions that aim to address grand challenges.
A New York State native, he holds degrees from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.