Animashree Anandkumar

Animashree Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech - California Institute of Technology, a key figure in the Computer Science faculty. She earned a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004 and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2009. She performed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2010. Subsequently, she was Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Irvine (2010-2016) and Associate Professor in the ICS Department (2016-2017). Anandkumar also held prominent industry roles: Principal Scientist in Amazon AI at AWS (2016-2018), Director of AI Research at NVIDIA (2018-2022), and Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA (2022-2023). She maintains a dual appointment as Director of Machine Learning Research at NVIDIA.

Anandkumar's academic interests center on machine learning foundations, tensor decomposition methods, probabilistic latent variable models, non-convex optimization, deep learning at scale, and reinforcement learning, with applications to AI for science. She pioneered neural operators, enabling surrogate modeling for PDEs in domains like climate modeling, where her FourCastNet achieves global high-resolution forecasts thousands of times faster than conventional systems; nuclear fusion plasma evolution; safer autonomous drones in extreme turbulence; quantum chemistry and protein-ligand binding for drug discovery; and functional enzyme design. As director of the Anima AI + Science Lab, her contributions advance principled AI for scientific discovery. Major honors include the Time 100 Impact Award (2025), IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2025), Blavatnik National Award Finalist (2024), Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), Fellows of IEEE (2020), ACM (2022), AAAI (2024), Schmidt AI2050 Senior Fellow (2023), ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize (2022), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2014), and NSF CAREER Award (2013). Select publications: "Neural Operators for Accelerating Scientific Simulations and Design" (Nature Reviews Physics, 2024), "Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric PDEs" (ICLR 2021), "Neural Operator: Learning Maps Between Function Spaces" (JMLR 2023), "FourCastNet: Accelerating Global High-Resolution Weather Forecasting using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators" (PASC 2023, Best Paper), "State-specific Protein–Ligand Complex Structure Prediction with a Multiscale Deep Generative Model" (Nature Machine Intelligence, 2024).

Professional Email: anima@caltech.edu