In a major recognition for the top India-origin tech skills that have virtually taken over Silicon Valley in the US, the Indian government has honored Padma Bhushan To Microsoft President and CEO Satya Nadella and alphabet and Google‘s Sundar Pichai Out of 17 award winners.
Padma Bhushan is the third highest civilian award in the country after Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan.
Born on June 10, 1972 in Madras (now Chennai), Pichai Sundararajan – better known as Sundar Pichai – earned his degree in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kharagpur.
After moving to the US, he earned his MS from Stanford University in Materials Science and Engineering and further earned his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Pichai started his career as a material engineer. After a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, he joined Google in 2004, and the rest is history.
Pichai was chosen as the next CEO of Google on August 10, 2015, after previously being appointed head of product by CEO Larry Page. He was appointed to the Alphabet Board of Directors in 2017.
He was included in Time’s annual list of 100 Most Influential People in 2016 and 2020.
Pichai is married to Anjali Pichai and they have two children. His recreational interests include cricket and football.
On the other hand, Satya Narayan Nadella was born on 17 August 1967 in Hyderabad (present day Telangana).
His mother Prabhavati was a Sanskrit lecturer, and his father, Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar, was a 1962 batch IAS officer.
Nadella studied at the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, before obtaining a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka in 1988.
He then moved to the US to study an MS in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, earning a degree in 1990.
Later, he did his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1997.
He is currently the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014 and John W. Thompson as chairman in 2021.
Prior to becoming CEO, he was executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, responsible for building and running the company’s computing platform.
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