Hari Balakrishnan is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His research is in networked computer systems, with current interests in networking, data management, and sensing for a world of "truly mobile" devices connected to cloud services running in large datacenters. His previous work includes the RON overlay network, the Chord DHT, the Cricket location system, the CarTel mobile sensing system, the CryptDB secure database system, computer-generated congestion control, verifiable Internet routing, the congestion manager, and wireless TCP.

He is an ACM Fellow (2008), a Sloan Fellow (2002), an ACM dissertation award winner (1998), and has received several best-paper awards including the IEEE Bennett prize (2004) and the ACM SIGCOMM "test of time" award (2011). He has also received a few awards for excellence in teaching and research at MIT: the Harold Edgerton faculty achievement award (2003), and the Jamieson (2012), Junior Bose (2002), and Spira (2001) teaching awards. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015.

In 2010, Balakrishnan co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a company that develops mobile sensing, inferencing, and data analytics to change driver behavior and make roads safer around the world. He was an advisor to Meraki from its inception in 2006 to its acquisition by Cisco in 2012. In 2003, Balakrishnan co-founded StreamBase Systems (acquired by TIBCO), the first high-performance commercial stream processing (aka complex event processing) engine. Between 2000 and 2003, he helped devise the key algorithms for Sandburst Corporation's (acquired by Broadcom) high-speed network QoS chipset.

Balakrishnan received his PhD in 1998 from UC Berkeley and a BTech in 1993 from IIT Madras, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2013.