Krishna had the mind of a scientist but the organizational skills of a religious leader or chief engineer. He looked ahead not years, but decades and lifetimes. His dream was to lay a scientific and engineering foundation that would aid people with paralysis by enabling them to control prosthetic devices directly with their brains. There was no hubris in this goal. Krishna saw what was possible at the time and what would soon become possible. He knew how to build on what others were doing, how to avoid short-term flashiness, and how to create long-term collaborations that could leverage that great temporal nonlinearity: progress is slower than you expect in any given year, yet stuns you with its swiftness over decades. Krishna had an unusual ability to subjugate his own ego in the service of this enterprise. It wasn’t his success that was important, it was the overall success of everyone he inspired to follow him in pursuit of shared goals. It was hope of making a large difference in the lives of patients. It was the belief that knowledge has lasting value, against which our petty daily vanities are uninteresting. You sensed that immediately, and it generated exactly the kind of trust and loyalty needed to sustain a project of the scope he envisioned.
Krishna was born in Sabetha, Kansas, USA, and always retained an unassuming Midwestern sensibility. Following in the footsteps of his engineer father, Pandu, Krishna studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Irvine. He obtained a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his dissertation won the Hertz Foundation Prize. Throwing himself into the culture of 1990s MIT, Krishna honed his skills as a prankster and agitator — skills he would unleash on the unsuspecting to remarkable effect even decades later. (To protect the innocent, stories can be provided discreetly upon reasonable request.) While at MIT, Krishna became acquainted with and inspired by world-class neuroscientists, including Ann Graybiel and Emilio Bizzi. Krishna was assured a plum job in industry, yet against the sensible advice of friends and family he chose to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. In the laboratory of Richard Andersen at the California Institute of Technology, Krishna was surrounded by some of the best visual neuroscientists of the time and quickly found an intellectual home. Visual neuroscience was highly amenable to engineering-inspired approaches. Krishna made good use of this synergy and published important work on the neural basis of motion-based heading perception (think hyperdrive in Star Wars and you get the general idea).
