creators

Anima Anandkumar: Caltech professor, AI for science

Anima Anandkumar is Bren Professor of Computing at Caltech, co-founder of Accelerated Understanding and a member of the UN Scientific Advisory Board.

Anima Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where she leads the AI+Science work and co-founded the AI4Science initiative in 2018. Born in Mysore, India, she took a BTech from IIT Madras in 2004 and a PhD from Cornell in 2009, did postdoctoral research at MIT and taught at UC Irvine before moving into industry as a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services and then senior director of AI research at NVIDIA. Her research covers tensor algorithms, non-convex optimisation and neural operators, a way of learning solution maps for physical systems that has been applied to weather forecasting, fusion simulation, medical device design and chip manufacturing. In August 2026 she and Benedikt Jenik launched Accelerated Understanding Inc., a company building neural-operator models of physics rather than of language. She joined the UN Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board in March 2026 and was named to the TIME100 AI list that August. She is a Fellow of the AAAI, the ACM and the IEEE and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.

Specialization

neural operators, AI for science, tensor methods, scientific machine learning

Country

United States