Anjana Rajan

Anjana Rajan is a cryptographer, technology executive, and entrepreneur who works at the nexus of human rights and national security. She currently is the Assistant National Cyber Director for Technology Security at The White House. In this political appointment at the Office of the National Cyber Director, Anjana leads efforts to apply the President’s National Cybersecurity Strategy to real world issues, such as open-source software, generative AI, and space.

Prior to joining the White House, she was the first Chief Technology Officer of Polaris, the largest anti-human trafficking NGO in the United States. She served on the organization’s executive team and led Polaris’s engineering, security, and technology departments. In this role, Anjana architected Polaris’s web3 & human rights vision, built a proactive security strategy to defend the organization against foreign malign influence operations and violent extremist threats, and created “Mission Engineering,” a leadership framework for technologists to build solutions for complex and dangerous problems.

Prior to working at Polaris, Anjana was the Chief Technology Officer of Callisto, a Y Combinator-backed and Skoll Award-winning social enterprise that builds advanced cryptographic technology to combat sexual assault. Anjana was a Tech Policy Fellow at The Aspen Institute, where she researched the intersection between mass shootings, domestic violence, and white supremacy extremism. She also served as an independent consultant for the Homeland Security Advisory Council and has testified before Congress as an expert witness on ways technology can protect survivors and victims of human trafficking.

Previously, Anjana worked at Palantir in their forward deployed engineering organization across Europe and the Middle East. Most notably, she was the commanding officer leading a highly-impactful deployment in the energy sector in Oman. Anjana began her career as a technologist at Johnson & Johnson focusing on building new software products across global healthcare markets.

Anjana was a Knight Scholar at Cornell University’s Engineering School and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Operations Research & Information Engineering. Anjana is a former elite triathlete who raced for Team USA at two World Championships.