Rahul Panicker

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Rahul Alex Panicker is a technology leader and entrepreneur from Kerala, India. Born in Mavelikkara, he studied at IIT Madras (B.Tech) and Stanford University (MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering), and he also studied at Stanford’s design school. His PhD work combined machine learning and optics to boost the capacity of multimode optical communication systems.

In 2007, while at Stanford, Panicker participated in the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course at the d.school. He and his team designed a low-cost, electricity-free infant warmer for use in developing countries. After the course, they co-founded Embrace as a nonprofit in 2008 and later started Embrace Innovations to sell the warmers. The devices cost less than 1% of traditional incubators and are used across clinics in India and more than 15 other developing countries. Embrace has won awards such as the INDEX: Design to Improve Life award (2011) and Fast Company’s Innovation by Design (2012). Panicker served as President of Embrace Innovations until early 2016.

Since then, he has focused on artificial intelligence, serving as Chief Innovation Officer at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence and speaking about AI’s potential impact on society, including at TEDx IIT Kharagpur. He is a member of the FICCI Health Innovation Task Force in India. Earlier in his career, he worked at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on neural networks for accelerator-beam control and had a stint at Infinera in the high-speed optical telecoms group. Panicker comes from a Kerala family; his parents are Moly and P.C. Mathen Panicker.