Vikram Jandhyala is Vice President for Innovation Strategy at the University of Washington, Executive Director of CoMotion (UW’s collaborative innovation hub) and Co-Executive Director of the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX). He is a professor and former chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering, an adjunct professor in the Information School and serves on the advisory boards of UW Foster Business School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, the Cambia Grove Healthcare Hub, Partners for Our Children and iInnovate. Jandhyala received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. After spending two years in the design automation industry at Ansoft Corporation (acquired by Ansys), he joined UW EE in 2000. His research, which has led to more than 200 papers and several Ph.D. students at top R&D positions, has been funded by DARPA, semiconductor industries, national labs, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. He has received an NSF CAREER award, as well as awards from UIUC, IEEE, UW and NASA. He founded, along with his students in 2006, Nimbic, a venture-backed simulation company which was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014. His current interests are in innovation, entrepreneurial and design thinking, social and organizational networks and computational and data science.