Naren Ramakrishnan is a highly accomplished Indian-American scholar and researcher specializing in recommendation systems, forecasting, data science, computational epidemiology, and urban analytics, and has been elevated to the rank of University Distinguished Professor by Virginia Tech.
Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor in the Department of Computer Science, joins 17 University Distinguished Professors across Virginia Tech whose scholarly work has received significant national or international recognition, according to a university release.
With a master’s degree from Anna University in Chennai, India, and a PhD in computer science from Purdue University, his career has been defined by a combination of groundbreaking research, significant leadership roles, and impactful collaborations across academia, government, and industry.
One notable example of his work is EMBERS, a forecasting project sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The forecasting project deployed a 24/7 live system to predict disease outbreaks, civil unrest, and election outcomes across multiple countries using open source data such as news, blogs, social media posts, food prices, network traffic, satellite imagery, atmospheric variables, and other metrics.
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EMBERS has pioneered the use of non-traditional data sources in machine learning. Ramakrishnan and his collaborators showed how signals such as hospital parking lot occupancy from satellite images, social media absenteeism, and restaurant reservation data can provide early clues about disease activity and broader patterns of human behavior. While these ideas initially seemed a little futuristic, they have become mainstream as supplementary metrics, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2025, EMBERS received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining’s “Test of Time” award, which honors the lasting impact of papers presented at conferences over the past decade.
“Dr. Ramakrishnan’s expertise and leadership in AI and machine learning will position Virginia Tech to be at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field,” said Virginia Tech President Tim Sands. “His continued research will help us anticipate change, develop informed policy, and prepare for the transformative impact this technology will have on our society.”
“I am deeply honored to have received this honor from Virginia Tech,” said Ramakrishnan. “It has given me a wonderful environment to pursue projects that can have a real impact, even if it takes years to realize them. I am grateful to the university’s leadership for fostering the many collaborative partnerships we have built in AI and data science.”
A recurring theme throughout Ramakrishnan’s research is the use of data to better understand human behavior, public health, and social change at the population scale. His research has contributed to both the methods available to study these phenomena and the understanding of the ethical and social issues involved.
Mr. Ramakrishnan is the founding director of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics and head of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning at the Institute for Advanced Computing.
At Northern Virginia, he has led the creation of several interdisciplinary initiatives, including the National Science Foundation-funded Urban Computing Graduate Certificate Program, which trains students to use data science and machine learning to study urban populations.
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Ramakrishnan also launched the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative for Efficient and Robust Machine Learning, a partnership that supports machine learning-focused research projects, doctoral student fellowships, community outreach, and the creation of a shared advisory board. Connecting Virginia Tech faculty with Amazon researchers provides access to problems, datasets, and computing resources, opening the door for faculty to tackle industry-focused problems from around the world.
He has also helped build an AI partnership in pediatric medicine with Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., co-led with VTC’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, and provided seed funding for projects in areas such as predicting treatments for childhood developmental disorders, predicting emergency department surges, and improving the accuracy of identifying rare genetic syndromes in children.
Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He served on the Governor’s AI Task Force and co-chaired the 2025 Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s AI Summit.
