Rajeev Motwani was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he also served as the director of graduate studies. His research interests included: databases and data mining, web search and information retrieval, robotics, and theoretical computer science. While at Stanford, he was the founder of the Mining Data at Stanford project, also known as MIDAS.

Motwani was well-known for his mentoring of Google co-founders Larry Paige and Sergey Brin.

He was a co-author of the book, Randomized Algorithms, published by Cambridge University Press. Motwani received the Arthur P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and an IBM Faculty Award.

Motwani studied computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and completed his doctorate at UC-Berkeley.

Rajeev Motwani died on June 5, 2009.