Anima Anandkumar

Anima Anandkumar has made fundamental contributions to AI that is revolutionizing scientific modeling and discovery.  She invented Neural Operators for learning multiscale phenomena that frequently occur in nature, such as fluid dynamics, material modeling and wave propagation. She employed Neural Operators to train the first AI-based high-resolution weather model. It is tens of thousands of times faster than existing physics-based forecasting, and is running at premier weather agencies. Her AI algorithms have enabled many other scientific advances such as modeling plasma evolution in nuclear fusion, enabling safer autonomous drone flights, and designing novel medical devices, drugs, and functional enzymes. Earlier in her career, Prof. Anandkumar spearheaded the development of tensor methods, probabilistic latent variable models, and analysis of non-convex optimization.

Anima is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. She has received several awards, including the Time 100 Impact Award, IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 senior fellow, awards from the Guggenheim, Alfred P. Sloan and Blavatnik Foundations, the NSF Career Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and best paper awards at venues such as Neural Information Processing and the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research. She recently presented her work on AI+Science to the White House Science Council (PCAST), the National AI Advisory Committee, and at TED 2024. 

Anima received her B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and her Ph.D. from Cornell University and did her postdoctoral research at MIT. She was previously principal scientist at Amazon Web Services and senior director of AI research at NVIDIA.