This Mysore-born scientist, whose great-grandfather was a mathematician and grandfather a Sanskrit scholar, helped make AI faster at weather forecasting & drug discovery

What if artificial intelligence could help solve some of the most complicated problems in physics and predict weather much faster than traditional computing methods? That is the area of research that has made Anima Anandkumar one of the prominent names in artificial intelligence and scientific computing.

Born in Mysore, Karnataka, Anandkumar grew up in a family with a strong connection to engineering and mathematics. Her parents are engineers, while her grandfather was a mathematician. Alongside her academic journey, she also learnt Bharatanatyam for several years.

Today, she is the Bren Professor of Computing at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where her research focuses on areas including tensor methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.

Anima Anandkumar's early life and education

As per her Caltech bio, Anandkumar was born in Mysore and grew up in an environment where science and mathematics were familiar parts of family life. Her parents are engineers and her grandfather was a mathematician.

But her interests were not limited to academics. She studied Bharatanatyam for years, pursuing the classical Indian dance form alongside her education.

She went on to study electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, graduating with a BTech degree in 2004.

From IIT Madras to Cornell University

After completing her engineering degree, Anandkumar moved to the US for higher studies. She joined Cornell University for her graduate education and completed her PhD in 2009 under the supervision of Lang Tong.

Her doctoral research focused on scalable algorithms for distributed statistical inference. During her PhD, she also worked with IBM's networking group on end-to-end service-level transactions.

Between 2008 and 2009, she was an IBM Fellow at Cornell University.

Anima Anandkumar's postdoctoral work at MIT

Following her PhD, Anandkumar worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until 2010.

At MIT, she worked with the Stochastic Systems Group under Alan Willsky. Her research during this period contributed to her broader work in statistical inference, machine learning and computational methods.

Her academic and research career would later take her into some of the biggest technology companies and research institutions in the world.

From Amazon to Caltech

Anandkumar went on to work at Amazon Web Services as a principal scientist. During her time at Amazon, she was involved in the development and launch of Amazon SageMaker, the company's machine learning service.

In 2017, she joined Caltech as the Bren Professor of Computing.

Her work at Caltech has centred on developing mathematical and computational approaches that can help artificial intelligence work with complex scientific problems.

Anima Anandkumar and her work on AI for science

A major part of Anandkumar's research involves using AI to tackle problems governed by the laws of physics.

One area associated with her research is neural operators. These are machine learning methods designed to learn relationships between functions, making them useful for modelling complex physical systems.

Her work has included applications in areas such as fluid dynamics, weather modelling and other scientific problems where traditional numerical simulations can be computationally demanding.

AI and weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is one of the areas where AI-based scientific models are being explored extensively.

Anandkumar has worked on high-resolution AI-based weather modelling, including research into neural operator approaches that can accelerate scientific simulations.

Rather than replacing the underlying laws of physics, these approaches aim to use machine learning to make certain computationally intensive scientific tasks faster and more efficient.

From Mysore to the global AI research community

Anandkumar's career has taken her from engineering studies at IIT Madras to research at Cornell and MIT, followed by roles at Amazon and Caltech.

She later joined NVIDIA as Senior Director of AI Research in 2018, continuing her work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, mathematics and scientific computing.

Her research has received recognition through honours including an IEEE Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award. She has also received faculty fellowships from companies including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Adobe.

Her research has been widely cited, reflecting the broader interest in her work across artificial intelligence, machine learning and scientific computing.

Anima Anandkumar's journey from Bharatanatyam to AI

Anandkumar's journey stands out for the unusual combination of interests that shaped her early years. The girl from Mysore who spent years learning Bharatanatyam eventually built a career around mathematics, engineering and artificial intelligence.

From IIT Madras and Cornell to MIT, Amazon, Caltech and NVIDIA, her career has remained focused on understanding difficult problems through mathematical and computational approaches.

Today, her work sits at an increasingly important intersection, where artificial intelligence meets the physical world, from complex scientific simulations to weather modelling.