Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation along with his wife Jaishree.
Dr. Deshpande has pursued an entrepreneurial career and built several companies including Cascade Communications and Sycamore Networks.
Dr. Deshpande lives in Boston and serves as a life-member of the MIT Corporation.
Deshpande Foundation setup MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in India, Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll) in Lowell/Lawrence Massachusetts and Pond-Deshpande Center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. They were founding funders of UPOP at MIT, I-Corp at NSF and MassChallenge.
Dr. Deshpande holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, an M.E. from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Ph.D from Queens University in Canada.