Gururaj Desh Deshpande is the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office and is also the Chairman of Tejas Networks. 'Desh' is the Founder of Deshpande Foundation, a global philanthropic organization nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship in universities and cities across USA, Canada and India. He is involved either as the founder, a founding investor or chairman of several companies including Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems and Curata. Desh lives in Boston and serves as a life-member of the MIT Corporation, and his support has made possible MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Along with his wife, he has founded several centers of innovation, at leading universities in the USA, Canada and India. 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.