Sanjay Sarma

Sanjay E. Sarma (born May 1968) is a professor of mechanical engineering and the Vice President for Open Learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is credited with developing many standards and technologies in the commercial RFID industry. At MIT, he is also the director of Digital Learning. Sarma also serves on the board of the MOOC provider edX as a representative of MIT.

Sarma earned his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1989, his ME from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1995.

Sarma is the son of the former Secretary, Government of India, Dr. E. A. S. Sarma. He is married to Dr. Gitanjali Swamy, daughter of Dr. Subramanian Swamy, an Indian politician. They have one daughter.

Sarma began his career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, after working for Schlumberger, Inc. and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.

Sarma and Dr. David Brock began work on RFID in 1998. In 1999, he co-founded the Auto-ID center at MIT together with Prof. Sunny Siu and Dr. David Brock of MIT, and Kevin Ashton of P&G in order to make the vision of standards based RFID a commercial reality. The center opened in 1999 as an industry sponsored, MIT research project with the express goal of creating a global open standard system to put RFID everywhere Auto-ID Center. When Siu departed, Sarma served as the research director and then the chairman of research. Under Sarma's leadership with Kevin Ashton, the number of sponsors grew to 103, and additional labs were funded at other major universities around the world. Once the EPC System was developed, MIT licensed it to non-profit standards body GS1 to create EPCglobal, and the Auto-ID Center project reached a successful conclusion. The center was renamed Auto-ID Labs and continue their research.

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