Prabhakar Raghavan


Prabhakar Raghavan is Head of Search at Google. His research spans algorithms, web search and databases and he is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms with Rajeev Motwani and Introduction to Information Retrieval.

Early life and education

Raghavan's mother, Amba Raghavan, taught physics and maths at St Joseph's Convent School, Bhopal after earning a master's degree from Presidency College, Chennai.
Raghavan himself holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science He did his schooling from Campion School, Bhopal.

Career

Prior to joining Google, he worked at Yahoo! Labs. Before that, Raghavan worked at IBM Research and later became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity.

Awards and honors

Raghavan is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. From 2003 to 2009, Raghavan was the editor-in-chief of Journal of the ACM.
In 1986, Raghavan received the Machtey Award for Best Student Paper. In 2000, he was named a fellow of the IEEE; received the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems; and received the Best Paper Award at the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference. In 2002, Raghavan was named a fellow of the ACM. He received the 2006 Distinguished Alumnus Award, UC Berkeley Division of Computer Science. In 2008, Raghavan was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering. and In 2009, he was awarded a Laurea honoris causa from the University of Bologna. In 2012 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the IIT Madras.