About Rikin Gandhi

Rikin Gandhi is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Green, a global non-profit that is working to create a world where farmers use technology and data to build prosperous communities.

Gandhi co-founded Digital Green as a research project on Microsoft Research India’s Technology for Emerging Markets team. After developing the core model of Digital Green’s approach to participatory videos to train smallholder farmers in sustainable agricultural practices, Gandhi quantified the impact in a controlled study to show the system can multiply the value of extension officers by over ten times, per dollar spent, of classical extension models. He published his results in papers in the journals Computer, MIT Innovations, and others.

Gandhi holds a master’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical space engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He began his career at Oracle, researching and productizing a linguistic-based search system for text retrieval that used phonetic similarity and entity extraction for document matching, receiving two patents for the work.

Spending time in India’s rural communities changed Gandhi’s life. He developed a passion for helping the country’s smallholder farmers, whom he sees as heroes. In service of elevating their voices, Gandhi has published a number of articles and books, including co-authoring Nature Sustainability's Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation, which constitutes an expert study on the future of local and global agri-food systems. In addition, he has been honored as a TED Fellow and Ashoka Fellow, and won numerous awards from MIT Technology Review TR35 and the Stockholm Challenge, among others.

About the 10th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series

In recognition of its 10th anniversary, the Tata-Cornell Institute's monthly 10th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series brings world-renowned scholars and experts in food systems and related fields to Cornell University to present on challenges facing food systems in the developing world. Lectures will be held in person at Cornell University or virtually on Zoom.