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Indian-American alumni endow BITS Pilani scholarships
The institute said the new alumni-funded scholarships are part of a broader endowment push that has crossed $45 million.
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Malvika Choudhary - Wed, 08, Apr 2026
- 14:05 EDT
- 36
(L-R) Krishna Saraswat, Krishna Sridhar / LinkedIn (Krishna Saraswat), LinkedIn (Krishna Sridhar)
BITS Pilani has announced new alumni-funded scholarships worth $500,000, with Indian-Americans Krishna Saraswat and Krishna Sridhar among the donors, as its endowment campaign crossed $45 million.
The institute said the newly endowed scholarships have been set up by distinguished alumni from multiple graduating batches, including Krishna Saraswat of the 1963 batch and alumni couple Krishna Sridhar and Arushi Aggarwal of the 2005 batch.
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Among the prominent donors is Saraswat, an Indian-American academic who is professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and previously served as the Rickey/Nielsen Professor in the School of Engineering.
A BITS Pilani graduate in electronics, Saraswat went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford, where he later joined the faculty.
Over the course of his career, Saraswat worked on silicon process technology, interconnects, semiconductor scaling, and new materials for nanoelectronics and is widely recognized for contributions to semiconductor research and chip manufacturing.
“I was born, brought up, and educated in Pilani from kindergarten to my BE degree at BITS. I owe my success to the excellent education I received in Pilani and to the upbringing I had from my father, Prof. Hiralal Sharma, a professor at Birla College of Science, and my mother, Mrs. Kashi Devi. My wife Sonia Saraswat and I are grateful for this opportunity to establish a scholarship at BITS,” Saraswat said in a statement released by the school.
Sridhar, another Indian-American alumnus named among the donors, is vice president of Engineering at Qualcomm, where he works on AI and edge deployment technologies.
A computer science graduate from BITS Pilani, Sridhar earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before joining Qualcomm, he co-founded Tetra AI, a startup focused on deploying AI and machine learning models efficiently on mobile and edge hardware that was later acquired by Qualcomm.
He previously worked at Apple, where he helped lead engineering efforts tied to CoreML and machine learning systems used across Apple devices.
“BITS Pilani was a life-changing experience for us. It challenged us every day to strive for excellence. We hope this scholarship will enable more students to access a similar learning experience and build their own journeys of growth and impact,” Sridhar and Aggarwal said.
The announcement comes as BITS Pilani’s endowment campaign moves toward its $100 million target.
With the latest additions, BITS Pilani said it now has more than 300 alumni-funded scholarships, apart from institutional scholarships that support one in every four students each year.
Discover more at New India Abroad.
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