Shiva Ayyadurai

Shiva Ayyadurai and actress Fran Drescher participated in a ceremony in September 2014 and tweeted that they had gotten married. However he later said it was not a formal wedding or marriage.

Shiva Ayyadurai was born on December 2, 1963, in Bombay, India, to a Hindu Tamil family. He moved along with his family to the United States when he was seven.

He grew up to be a good student and studied computer programming at a special summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU).

He attended Livingston High School in Livingston, New Jersey. While studying there he also volunteered at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).

One of his supervisors there, Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, recognized his abilities and challenged him to recreate an electronic system replicating the conventional paper-based communication system.

Ayyadurai, just 14 years old at that time, envisioned a system to quickly and easily send digital messages. He began his project by performing a thorough study of the UMDNJ's paper-based mail system which was the same as that used in offices and organizations around the world.

Shiva Ayyadurai embarked on a highly successful academic career and obtained a Ph.D in biological engineering from MIT in systems biology in 2007. His thesis focused on modeling the whole cell by integrating molecular pathway models.

In 2008, he won a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant to study the integration of Siddha, India's oldest system of traditional medicine, with modern systems biology in India.

Over the ensuing years he worked as an educator, inventor and systems scientist. A brilliant and versatile individual, his works range across fields as diverse as technology, medicine, media and art.

As an entrepreneur he has started and successfully grown several start-up companies. After winning a White House competition to automatically analyze and sort mail, he founded EchoMail, Inc., a company which offers email and social media marketing, monitoring and management solutions for Global 2000 Companies and the SMB markets.

He is also the founder of the Systems Health online educational program, an initiative to bridge the gap between the foundations of modern science and the collective wisdom from ancient traditions of Siddha, Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The courses offered by the program aim to integrate both Eastern and Western systems of medicine to create a new scientific method.

At the age of 14, he created the world's first email system for which he was recognized by the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He developed the electronic version of the paper-based interoffice mail system then in use at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey where he volunteered as a high school student.