Lav Varshney is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, industrial engineering, neuroscience, and digital agriculture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a Disruption Fellow in the Gies College of Business there. He further serves as chief scientist at Ensaras, Inc., a startup focused on AI and sustainability. He was recently on leave as principal research scientist at Salesforce Research, leading new initiatives in AI ethics and AI for social good. He received his B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University, and his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His development of the IBM Chef Watson system pioneered the real-world deployment of computational creativity technologies. He has discussed computational creativity at public venues such as the World Science Festival and the Age of AI documentary series.