Animashree Anandkumar

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She holds a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (2004) and a Ph.D. from Cornell University (2009). Prior to her current role, she was a Visiting Associate at Caltech (2017) and served as a Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA and Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services. Her research focuses on large-scale machine learning, non-convex optimization, and high-dimensional statistics, with pioneering work on tensor decomposition methods for probabilistic models and neural operators for scientific simulations.

Research Interests: Anima's work bridges AI and science, emphasizing scalable and interpretable algorithms. Key areas include quantum optimization, climate modeling via Fourier Neural Operators, medical AI for surgical skill assessment, and physics-informed neural networks for PDEs. Her lab, Anima AI+Science, drives interdisciplinary projects in climate, aerospace, engineering, and medicine.

Awards & Recognition: She has received the IEEE Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Blavatnik National Awards Finalist distinction. Her contributions to AI+Science include 45000x faster weather forecasting and AI-aided catheter design.

Advising & Teams: Advises over 20 Ph.D. students and postdocs, many of whom hold faculty positions or lead roles in industry. Her lab collaborates with institutions globally on projects like the DeepSpeed4Science initiative for large-scale scientific discovery.

Labs & Projects: The Anima AI+Science Lab advances AI methods for climate prediction (FourCastNet), aerospace control (FALCON), and molecular design (OrbNet). Ongoing efforts include quantum computing solvers, turbulence-resistant flight systems, and surgical skill analytics.