Satya Nadella is Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft. Before being named CEO in February 2014, Nadella held leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company.

Joining Microsoft in 1992, he quickly became known as a leader who could span a breadth of technologies and businesses to transform some of Microsoft’s biggest product offerings.

Most recently, Nadella was executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group. In this role he led the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business, which outperformed the market and took share from competition. Previously, Nadella led R&D for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, Nadella was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems.

Originally from Hyderabad, India, Nadella lives in Bellevue, Washington. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University, a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago. Nadella serves on the board of trustees to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and his alma mater the University of Chicago, as well as the Starbucks board of directors. He is married and has three children.


Fireside Chat conducted by Dr. Harry Shum

Dr. Harry Shum is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University.

From 2013-2020, Dr. Shum was the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group. He oversaw Microsoft Research (MSR) as well as AI-focused product groups including Bing. He served as the corporate vice president responsible for Bing search product development from 2007 to 2013.

Dr. Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 as a researcher based in Redmond, Washington. In 1998 he moved to Beijing as one of the founding members of Microsoft Research China (later renamed Microsoft Research Asia). There he began a nine-year tenure as a researcher, subsequently moving on to become research manager, assistant managing director and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and a Distinguished Engineer.

Dr. Shum is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.