Naren Ramakrishnan

Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech. At Virginia Tech, he directs the Discovery Analytics Center, a university-wide effort that brings together researchers from computer science, statistics, mathematics, and electrical and computer engineering to tackle knowledge discovery problems in important areas of national interest, including intelligence analysis, sustainability, and electronic medical records. His research has been supported by NSF, DHS, NIH, NEH, IARPA, DARPA, DTRA, ONR, US Army, General Motors, HP Labs, NEC Labs, and Advance Auto Parts. His work has been featured in the NIH outreach publication Biomedical Computation Review, the National Science Foundation’s Discoveries series, Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, Popular Science, Slate magazine, and ACM Technews.

Naren serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and many other journals. He has served as both program chair and general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). Naren was an invited co-organizer of the NAE Frontiers of Engineering symposium in 2009.

Naren has received an NSF CAREER grant (2000), the New Century Technology Council Innovation Award (2001), DARPA BioSPICE Early Contributor Appreciation Award (2002), Dean’s awards for both teaching excellence (2005) and research excellence (2010) at Virginia Tech, and a HP Labs innovation award (2009). He was included in two “40 under 40” lists: Computerworld’s innovative IT people to watch (2007) and Purdue University’s list of distinguished alumni (2010). Naren is an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2009). He is a recipient of Virginia Tech’s Alumni award for research excellence (2011) – the highest research award given at the univerity.

Naren received his Ph.D. in computer sciences from Purdue University. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, AAAS, and the AAAI.