Anjana
Rajan
Anjana Rajan is a cryptographer working at the nexus of human rights and national security. Currently, she is the Chief Technology Officer of Polaris, the largest anti-human trafficking NGO in the United States. She serves on the organization’s executive team and leads Polaris’s engineering, security, and technology departments. In this role, Anjana is architecting Polaris’s web3 & human rights vision, has built a robust strategy to defend the organization against disinformation threats caused by violent extremist groups, and is the creator of the “Mission Engineering” methodology that builds innovative technology solutions for programs such as the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the Financial Intelligence Unit, and the National Survivor Study.
Anjana has a prolific career as a public interest technologist. She is the former Chief Technology Officer of Callisto, a nonprofit that builds advanced cryptographic technology to combat sexual assault. Anjana serves as an Inaugural Visiting Practitioner at Cornell Tech and was a Tech Policy Fellow at the Aspen Institute. She previously served as an independent consultant for the Homeland Security Advisory Council and has testified before Congress as an expert witness to speak about ways technology can protect survivors and victims of human trafficking.
Anjana began her career in Silicon Valley, working at Palantir Technologies on their Forward Deployed Engineering team and being a founder in Y Combinator. Anjana was a Knight Scholar at Cornell University’s Engineering School and received her bachelor's and master's degrees in Operations Research and Information Engineering.