Umesh V. Vazirani is a Research Director for Quantum Computing Simons Institute, and the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. He received his BTech in Computer Science from MIT in 1981 and his PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1985. Vazirani's research interests include computational learning theory, combinatorial algorithms, computational complexity theory and quantum computing. He received the 2012 Fulkerson Prize (with Sanjeev Arora and Satish Rao) for his work on approximation algorithms for sparsest cut.