Viral Shah

Dr. Viral B. Shah is one of the creators of the Julia programming language and co-founder and CEO of JuliaHub. Julia combines the ease of use of Python with the speed of C. It has been downloaded over 50 million times, and is now taught at MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and many universities worldwide. Dr. Shah received the prestigious James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 2019. He is also one of the authors of Circuitscape, an open-source program that borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory for ecological conservation. Dr. Shah helped create India’s national identification project (Aadhaar), where his work on re-architecting India’s social security systems led to a significant increase in social and financial inclusion. His book - Rebooting India - describes his experience with building digital public goods and what it takes to execute large bold projects in government. Dr. Shah earned his PhD in Computer Science from the UC Santa Barbara.