Satish Rao received his PhD from MIT in 1989, then held a scientist position at NEC Laboratories until 1999. He then joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now a professor of computer science. He works in the areas of combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms. Rao received the Fulkerson Prize (with Sanjeev Arora and Umesh Vazirani) in 2012 for his work on approximation algorithms for sparsest cut.