Mohan Kankanhalli was born in Ahmedabad, India and did his schooling in Ahmedabad (St. Xavier's High School, Loyola Hall [1970-75, 1979-82]), Morvi (Lion's English School [1975-1978]) and Vadodra (Rosary High School [1978-79]). He then obtained his B-Tech (Electrical Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1986 and his MS and PhD (Computer and Systems Engineering) from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1988 and 1990, respectively. He subsequently joined the Institute of Systems Science (ISS - now Institute for Infocomm Research) in October 1990. He left ISS in June 1997 and spent the 1997-1998 academic year at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has been with Department of Computer Science of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore since May 1998 where he is a Professor. He is also the Associate Provost (Graduate Education) for NUS. He was earlier the School of Computing Vice-Dean for Research during 2001-2007 and Vice-Dean for Graduate Studies during 2007-2010. He visited the Garage Cinema Group at the University of California at Berkeley during Jan-Jun 2004. He is married to Atreyi and has two children.