Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, the inventor of email and systems scientist, created the program to recognize and provide resources currently not available to inner city high school students with ideas and potentials. He currently speaks at high schools, universities on the power of innovation, encouraging youth to embrace entrepreneurship. He is Founder and a Director at the International Center for Integrative Systems located in Cambridge, MA. He holds four degrees from MIT including his PhD in Biological Engineering. He has founded multiple businesses over the last thirty years. At the age fourteen, he was given the right environment and support to become inventor of world’s first email system, when he was a high school student in Newark, New Jersey. He continued developing many innovations, including one of the first email management systems for business when he was a graduate student in MIT and more recently, an in-silico based platform to find cure for deadly diseases.
Dr. VA Shiva became intrigued with medicine at the age of five, as he observed his grandmother, a farmer and healer in the small village of Muhavur in South India, apply the ancient healing tradition of Siddha to heal and support local villagers.
These early experiences drove him to pursue modern Western science and technology and Eastern medicine, with the aim of becoming a scientist and healer. Over the last three decades, his formal Western research and study has focused on developing new systems for pattern analysis across multiple disciplines. In parallel, he has trained in many Eastern modalities, including various forms of yoga, meditation, nutritional and herbal medicines, learning from esteemed sages and masters in the oral tradition. In 2007, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study traditional medicines and systems biology.
Dr. VA Shiva holds four degrees from MIT, including a B.A. in electrical engineering and computer science; and, a dual master’s degree in mechanical engineering and visual studies from the MIT Media Laboratory. He completed his Ph.D. in systems biology at the Department of Biological Engineering, where he developed CytoSolve, a scalable computational platform for dynamic integration of molecular pathways models. The website www.vashiva.com provides a gateway to learn the power of the systems approach to all aspects of life.
