Kavita Ramanan

Kavita Ramanan is the Roland George Dwight Richardson University Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, serving as Associate Chair of the Division of Applied Mathematics since 2017. She is an Associate Director at ICERM (Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics) and has held roles such as Director of Graduate Studies (2011–2014). Her academic journey includes a PhD from Brown University (1998), postdoctoral work at the Technion, and prior faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University before joining Brown in 2010.

Her research focuses on probability theory, stochastic processes, large deviations, interacting particle systems, and applications to stochastic networks. She has pioneered mathematical frameworks for analyzing complex systems across operations research, engineering, and neuroscience, combining tools from discrete probability, convex analysis, and stochastic analysis. Notably, she holds four patents from her tenure at Bell Laboratories.

Ramanan has received prestigious awards including the Erlang Prize (2006), Simons Fellowship (2018), and Guggenheim Fellowship (2020). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of multiple societies (AMS, SIAM, IMS). Her editorial roles span journals like Annals of Probability and Mathematics of Operations Research.

Committed to outreach, she founded the Math CoOp at Brown, organizes the bilingual Mathematics-Sin-Fronteras lecture series, and co-founded the AWM Student Chapter. She actively promotes inclusivity in mathematics, including narrating a documentary on Srinivasa Ramanujan and serving on the editorial board of Bhavana magazine.