Kush R. Varshney was born in Syracuse, New York in 1982. He received the B.S. degree (magna cum laude) in electrical and computer engineering with honors from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2004. He received the S.M. degree in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in 2010, both in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. While at MIT, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Dr. Varshney is a distinguished research scientist and manager with IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he leads the machine learning group in the Trustworthy Machine Intelligence department. He was a visiting scientist at IBM Research - Africa, Nairobi, Kenya in 2019. He is the founding co-director of the IBM Science for Social Good initiative. He applies data science and predictive analytics to human capital management, healthcare, olfaction, computational creativity, public affairs, international development, and algorithmic fairness.

He and his team created several well-known open-source toolkits, including AI Fairness 360, AI Explainability 360, Uncertainty Quantification 360, and AI FactSheets 360. AI Fairness 360. He conducts academic research on the theory and methods of trustworthy machine learning. He independently-published a book entitled 'Trustworthy Machine Learning' in 2022, available at http://www.trustworthymachinelearning.com.