I am from India but even in India I am from Kerala which is one of the southern states but I was born in Bihar and then I moved and attended six schools between kindergarten and high school so just get moving. Born in Bihar and I did high school in Chennai, a middle school in Gujarat and college in Delhi and Rajasthan, grad school in Chapel Hill North Carolina. I got my Ph.D. at C.M.U in Pittsburgh, I worked in Boston and now I'm in Washington DC. All my life, I've moved around quite in general, and comfortable it most places. What kind of things do I enjoy, sports, I used to play squash for the longest time till I ended up injuring one of my ankles. Music, I just talked about that, I used to play for a band when I was in grad school and I still, sort of, enjoy dabbling in music. Other than that, now I'm getting into basketball with my son, it's interesting to go to pick up a sport with your son because he beats me at it but it's still good, it gets me out of my comfort zone so that's always fun.

Our undergraduate program apparently, it's quite though of highly ranked within the university of Maryland. Our undergraduate I.S. program is really focused on mainstream I.S. we prepare our students for jobs IT consulting firms. We have students who go into social media company like facebook and twitter, we have a lot of them who go into defense contracts because we are in Washington so that's a very large section of our employers, Lockheed Martin are companies that come and pick up a lot of our students even though a lot of the IT consulting jobs tend to be defense-oriented or for the federal government so that is the sort of nature of our undergraduate program.With the MBAs, MBA is a little bit more of a diversified so I would say the two majors that people tend to prefer are finance and marketing so we've had success with having people do a double major when they do finance andtechnology or marketing and technology and that combination seems to work quite well so our MBA recruiting is a little bit more broad-based as thirty percent of our students are international so they tend to not look like defense contractors because there are a Visa issues. We also have a masters program in M.S. and I.S. which is doing quite well we have an incoming batch between a hundred and ten and hundred and twenty every year and that's mostly international, I would say ninety percent of the incoming batch is international. They have a few more problems the but they, for the most part, end up in technical jobs so developers at Walmart, social media analyst at Wayfair, business analyst at Pricewaterhouse, Beloit so those are some of the more traditional IT jobs, not quite entry-level but a little better than that so these are people that two or three of the work experience so that seems to be our sweet spot for now hopefully because the turmoil in the immigration scenario so we don't know where things are gonna go but at least that's the sort of strategic position that we are in.

In the master's program, we have had students who occasionally own who come in from a business background, like they have done a bachelors in business and finance or a bachelors in accounting and economics and they come in are not realizing that there is a level of technical content that they have to master so we have to sort ofwork with them and get them up to speed as quickly as possible because almost half the content tends to be verytechnical in nature so that can be sometimes a problem but other than that we've been quite lucky in terms of being able to hit the required skills so we have people who come in with computer science degrees, electronics degree, electrical engineering, we have a student who comes in from a civil engineering background but has done technical work before coming into the program, we have people who come in from computational economic so in M.S. , I.S. program or our marketing is that sixty percent of the program is technical forty percent of it is more managerial. You should be ready to do the technical stuff but it's not pure technical in the sense that it's not a replacement for a masters in computer science, there is a sizeable business component to it and you need to be okay with this mix. We haven't really had any issues with the wrong student getting into the wrong program that having to do remedial work but not systematically. At this point, my research interests are broadly technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, and the technology service so they sound a little weird because they're on the three buckets so let me give you a quick description of each so when I talk about technology platform I'm talking about, as you are clearly familiar with this stuff, so well you're talking about companies that are essentially market makers like the Facebook, Google and the Amazons of the world where you have your different parts of the market being connected on the basis of technology so the platform provides a matching function, it provides a market-making function, it provides auxiliary services so we have a lot of work that looks at various forms all these technology platforms. The second stream is somewhat uncommon in terms of traditional I.S. research which is the entrepreneurship and innovation I think you're the kind of person who will understand these points. In general, I think the focus here is on understanding how new IT firms or the new technology firms are all. How do they gain support, what is their ecosystem, what is the ecology, how did the role of the become viable and eventually how do they succeed either in the form of being an IPO or in form of being bought out. In some cases they failed, that's fine too as long as people are able to work quickly enough and do something else with their time. These are the general questions about early age firms mostly technology, for the most part, research in this area has stayed in strategy and finance so you have a lot of papers in strategy and finance concerned that have looked at technology firms and how they grow which is sort of interesting because arguably people in IT also have a contribution to the literature and eventually understand more of the technology and the various pieces that work together with relative to a scholar in finance and strategy but there's been this black hole in the I.S. research on understanding entrepreneurial questions about technology and so I think a few years ago I started working in this area with acouple of my colleagues and we realized that there is a hole to be filled so that they can be more workers really looking at this notion of entrepreneurship and technology which, to my mind, is very fertile area for I.S. researchbecause that's what we do. The third area is services which is my dissertation many years ago was on software sourcing and that continues to have sort of a sweet spot like I have a liking or a very affectionate sense of belonging for that community, for that literature so I still have a little bit of work that looks at things like software outsourcing, strategic sourcing, contracts, these are things that I have studied in the past. That stream of work is not quite as active at this point in time as the other two but it is still what I wrote my dissertation on so there'salways the level of affection for the kind of work but it is relatively small compared to the volume on the other twoparts of my research.