Varun Kanade joined UC Berkeley as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow in Fall 2012. He was a PhD student at Harvard University between Fall 2009 and Summer 2012, and had Leslie Valiant as his adviser. Before joining Harvard, he was a graduate student at Georgia Tech, where he worked with Adam Kalai (now at Microsoft Research). Kanade obtained a BTech at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India in 2006.  His primary research interests are in computational learning theory, including connections to biological evolution.