Rohan Murty


Rohan Narayana Murty is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the founder of the Murty Classical Library of India. He is also the founder and Chief Technical Officer of a digital transformation company, Soroco, specialised in automation using Artificial intelligence sources.

Background and personal life

Rohan is the son of Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, and his wife Sudha Murthy, an engineer and author of note. Shrinivas Kulkarni, a professor of astrophysics and planetary science at California Institute of Technology is his maternal uncle, and is said to have been a major influence on Rohan. He grew up with a deep passion for programming since his childhood.
Rohan studied at the Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore for 12 years, from pre-school to higher secondary school. After completing his 12th standard board exams from there, he moved to the US and took an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Cornell University. This was followed by a PhD in computer engineering from Harvard university, which he obtained in 2011. The subject of his doctoral thesis was Opportunistic Wireless Networks, being networks which work by continually seeking and using underused portions of spectrum currently, and vacating them if any incumbent returns. His PhD was supported by a Siebel Scholars Fellowship and a Microsoft Research Fellowship.
He married Lakshmi Venu, daughter of TVS Motors Chairman Venu Srinivasan, in June 2011 and the couple got divorced in 2015. Rohan married Aparna Krishnan, the daughter of a Kochi-based retired SBI employee Savithri Krishnan and a former Indian Navy officer Commander KR Krishnan, in December 2019. His elder sister, Akshata, is married to United Kingdom Conservative Party politician and MP Rishi Sunak.

Corporate career

He is currently on leave from being a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is associated with Catamaran Ventures, a $127-million venture capital fund headed by N.R.N. Murthy.
In June 2013, Rohan was appointed as an executive assistant at the Chairman's Office reporting to Narayana Murthy at Infosys, when Narayana Murthy returned to Infosys. His appointment as Vice President at Infosys was subjected to approval by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, India. Rohan left company on 14 June 2014 when his father stepped down as Executive Chairman.
As on 1 June 2013, he is said to have owned Infosys shares worth $347 million.

Murty Classical Library

Although he does not read Sanskrit, when he was a doctoral student of computer science at Harvard he took a class focussing on Kumarila Bhatta’s Shlokavartika, which got him interested in ancient Indian philosophy and sciences.
He is the founder of the Murty Classical Library of India, which is a continuation of the Clay Sanskrit Library Project headed by Sheldon Pollock. In 2016 he rejected a petition asking that Sheldon Pollock be removed from the position of the chief editor of the Murty Classical Library.

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