Eduardo Bhatia - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Eduardo Bhatia Gautier was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, on May 16, 1964. Bhatia’s father, the economist and retired professor Mohinder Bhatia, came to Puerto Rico in 1957 as an assistant to a Syracuse University professor who had been in India on a one-year sabbatical. He remained in Puerto Rico and married Carmen Gautier in 1960, a political science professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Eduardo Bhatia is one of three siblings. His brother, Andrés Bhatia, is a practicing oncologist in Gainesville, Florida, and his sister, Lisa Bhatia, is an assistant U.S. attorney at the San Juan District office of the U.S. Attorney. He is also a member of the Phi Sigma Alpha fraternity.

Bhatia attended Princeton University, where he was a classmate of Jeff Bezos, currently founder and CEO of Amazon, and the London School of Economics, obtaining his Bachelor's degree in Government and Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1986. During Bhatia's university years, he was a member of the Princeton Democratic Students Association and the Student Council, actively participating in the student movement against Apartheid in South Africa. In May 1986, Bhatia was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study law, economics and politics in Santiago, Chile for one year.

Bhatia graduated from Stanford Law School in June 1990 where he founded and edited the "Stanford Journal of Law and Policy", an academic publication with an emphasis on the development of new laws and public policy. As part of his community work as a law student in Stanford, Bhatia also successfully directed a campaign to prevent the approval of a rent increase in the low-income East Palo Alto community. He is admitted to practice law in Florida, Washington D.C. and The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.