Dr. Jyotika Virmani

Senior Director, Prize Operations

Los Angeles

Dr. Jyotika Virmani is a Senior Director in Prize Operations at the XPRIZE Foundation and is the Prize Lead for the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, a three-year competition to develop underwater deep-sea robots for high-resolution ocean exploration. She joined XPRIZE in 2014 as the Technical Director for the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a competition to develop sensors to measure ocean acidification. Before joining XPRIZE, Dr. Virmani served as the Associate Director of the Florida Institute of Oceanography and as a Senior Scientist at the UK Met Office. She has a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of South Florida. As a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar, she earned a M.S. in Atmospheric Science from SUNY at Stony Brook. She also has a B.Sc. in Physics from Imperial College London and is an Associate of the Royal College of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. In her spare time she maintains a humorous and informative tropical storms blog.