Pranav Kulkarni is the Executive Director at Echelon Scholars, a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), a 15x published researcher, and an inducted member of the SoftBank Masayoshi Foundation. While in high school, Pranav invented a corollary to the Newton–Gauss Theorem, earning Best Paper Award at the IEEE ICKII Conference, becoming the youngest recipient in the conference’s history. His research has since been cited in numerous postgraduate venues, and he has been invited to speak at 10+ international conferences, including those hosted by the IEEE, the American Mathematical Society, and MIT.
During his senior year of high school, Pranav was accepted to every university he applied to, including Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Cornell. He chose to attend Stanford University to pursue a dual degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. Alongside his academic pursuits, Pranav is a venture-backed entrepreneur who has founded and advised multiple companies in AI, consulting, and energy systems. Pranav founded Echelon Scholars to help high-school students publish at the postgraduate level, a mission that has led to 100% publication success and over 50 peer-reviewed papers in venues such as IEEE. Beyond research, Pranav is dedicated to helping students gain admission to world-class universities and transform their lives through the same opportunities that research once opened for him.
At Echelon Scholars, we strive to recruit world-class mentors and advisors—individuals who not only conduct groundbreaking research and lead innovation at top global institutions but also embody a pedigree of excellence and achievement. Our mentors come from diverse fields across AI, physics, economics, and life sciences, and include those who have won international academic competitions such as ISEF, Google Science Fair, and Regeneron, studied at elite U.S. universities such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Ivy League, and led cutting-edge projects at premier research labs.
Today, members of our mentor and advisory network have led teams of dozens of researchers, founded companies together valued at over $100 million, invested in frontier organizations such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and guide the next generation of innovators. Together, they have helped dozens of students publish world-class, peer-reviewed research, continuing Echelon’s mission to make high-impact scholarship accessible to ambitious students worldwide.
