Robert C. Sarvis is a native son of Northern Virginia. He was born at Fairfax Hospital, the youngest of three children of an immigrant Chinese mother and a Kansas-born father. In his early years, he grew up playing West Springfield Little League baseball, participating in Cub Scouts & Boy Scouts, rooting for the Washington Redskins, and target-shooting with his dad at Fairfax Rod & Gun Club. He attended Keene Mill and White Oaks Elementary Schools, served as an acolyte at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church.
When Rob was nine, his father died. Rob’s mother raised him by herself for the next eight years while working a full-time job, attending night classes at No. Va. Community College, and putting her older children through college at MIT. Rob credits her with teaching him hard work, sacrifice, and unconditional love. As a result of her focus on education and her nurturing of his interest in math and science, Rob did well in school and went to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology. He competed successfully in several national academic competitions, such as the Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Talent Search, and attended math- and science-focused summer camps, like the Ross Mathematics Program and the Research Science Institute.
Rob graduated from Thomas Jefferson in 1994 and went to Harvard University for college. He majored in mathematics while also studying economics and computer science, and spent summers doing technical work and mathematics research for the Department of Defense. He graduated from Harvard in 1998 and went on to study at the University of Cambridge, where he received the degree of Master of Advanced Studies in Mathematics in 1999. Rob began a math Ph.D. program at Berkeley, but left to join an internet startup in San Francisco, where he worked as a software developer until late 2001, when the internet bubble burst resulting in layoffs at the company.
In 2002, Rob returned to school to study law at NYU. There, Rob co-founded the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty and received the John Bruce Moore Award for Excellence in Law and Philosophy and the Vanderbilt Medal for Outstanding Contributions to the Law School. He received his J.D. in 2005, served as a law clerk to the Honorable E. Grady Jolly on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and then joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s D.C. office as an attorney.
In 2008, following the launch of the iPhone and Android platforms, Rob left the law firm and co-founded a mobile-applications development company that won Google’s Android Developer Challenge that same year. He has returned on numerous occasions to Thomas Jefferson to speak to math and computer-science classes and business/economics and political student groups about his educational and professional experiences and about entrepreneurship, business, and the mobile-app industry. He has also been active in arguing against over-regulation of the technology sector and has participated in panel discussions on the mobile-app economy.
Rob lives with his family in Annandale. His wife, Astrid, hails from Greenville, MS, and is a pediatric resident at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Rob and Astrid have a son, Harlan, and a daughter, Ai-Li Mae.
