Pankaj Mehra

Pankaj Mehra is Professor of Research in Computer Science and Engineering department at The Ohio State University. He founded Elephance Memory, a company that builds software to optimize disaggregated data center memory for data infrastructure and applications. Pankaj has held executive positions in the Memory industry since 2013 when he took over as SVP and WW CTO of Fusion-io, later serving as VP and Senior Fellow at both acquirers SanDisk and Western Digital. Pankaj Mehra led SmartSSD (as VP of Product Planning) and other workload-optimized flash storage products (as VP of Storage Pathfinding) at Samsung, for which he and his team of 10 received Samsung's prestigious R&D Award in 2019. SmartSSD went on to win the CES R&D Innovation Award in 2021. Previously at Hewlett-Packard, Pankaj was promoted to HP Distinguished Technologist in 2004 for his pioneering work on RDMA-attached persistent memory devices and filesystems. Later he founded HP Labs Russia and served as its Chief Scientist until 2010. He is also the founder of startups IntelliFabric, Whodini and AwarenaaS. Pankaj's international experience spans academia, industry and government. His publications include 3 books and over 100 papers and patents. Pankaj holds Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.