Lav R. Varshney is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, with further affiliations in Computer Science, Neuroscience, Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, Digital Agriculture, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, all at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.S. degree with honors in electrical and computer engineering (magna cum laude) from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2004. He received the S.M., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge in 2006, 2008, and 2010, respectively.

Varshney was named a White House Fellow for the 2022-2023 class, where he was placed at the National Security Council as Deputy Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology. He was a principal research scientist at Salesforce Research during 2019-2020, focused on AI ethics and AI for Good. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 2010 until 2013, where he conceptualized and led the development and deployment of the Chef Watson computational creativity system to worldwide recognition. Varshney is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi, and a senior member of IEEE. He was a founding member of the IEEE Special Interest Group on Big Data in Signal Processing and served on the Shannon Centenary Committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society.