Anima Anandkumar
2024 National Award Finalist — Faculty
Current Position:
Bren Professor in Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Institution:
California Institute of Technology
Discipline:
Computer Science
Recognized for: Groundbreaking advancements in AI to address practical scientific challenges, drastically accelerating simulation of complex phenomena like weather forecasting, scientific simulations, engineering design and scientific discovery.
Areas of Research Interest and Expertise:
AI Algorithms, AI + Science, Neural Operators, PDE, Tensor Methods
Previous Positions:
Senior Director of AI Research, NVIDIA
Principal Scientist, Amazon AI, Amazon Web Services
Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, University of California Irvine
Postdoctoral Scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Alan Willsky)
PhD, Cornell University (Lang Tong)
BTech, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
Research Summary:
Today's scientific research is often constrained by time-consuming physical experiments and limited computational resources. Anima Anandkumar, PhD, is transforming this landscape with neural operators—AI models that efficiently predict complex physical processes—greatly accelerating scientific discoveries across diverse fields. Her work addresses real-world challenges, including weather forecasting, plasma simulation in nuclear fusion, modeling carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation and drug discovery. Anandkumar’s innovations have democratized AI through open-source tools and led to practical applications, such as the first AI-based high-resolution weather model that is both faster and more accurate than traditional methods.
“I believe that combining AI and Science is the future of scientific research. My work involves designing new AI algorithms that are physics-informed and integrate ideas from numerical methods and machine learning to accelerate scientific understanding and discovery.”
Key Publications:
- Z Li, N Kovachki, K Azizzadenesheli, B Liu, K Bhattacharya, A Stuart, A Anandkumar. Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations. Proceedings of ICLR, 2021.
- K Azizzadenesheli, N Kovachki, Z Li, M Liu-Schiaffini, J Kossaifi, A Anandkumar. Neural operators for accelerating scientific simulations and design. Nature Reviews Physics, volume 6, pages, 320–328, 2024.
- T Kurth, S Subramanian, P Harrington, J Pathak, M Mardani, D Hall, A Miele, K Kashinath, A Anandkumar. FourCastNet: Accelerating Global High-Resolution Weather Forecasting Using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators. Proceedings of PASC, 2023.
- A Anandkumar, R Ge, D Hsu, SM Kakade, M Telgarsky. Tensor Decompositions for Learning Latent Variable Models. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2014.
Other Honors:
2025 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award
2024 Distinguished Alumnus Award by Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
2023 Schmidt Futures AI2050 Senior Fellow
2023 Guggenheim Fellow
2022 Association for Computing Machinery Fellow
2022 ACM Gordon-Bell Special Prize for HPC for Covid-19 Research
2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow
2018 New York Times Good Tech Award
2015 Google Faculty Research Award
2015 AFOSR Young Investigator Award
In the Media:
TED – AI that connects the digital and physical worlds
MIT Technology Review – AI has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world
Wired – AI Hurricane Predictions Are Storming the World of Weather Forecasting
Scientific American – AI-Optimized Catheter Design Could Prevent Urinary Tract Infections without Drugs
NY Times – How ‘A.I. Agents’ That Roam the Internet Could One Day Replace Workers
Quanta Magazine – The AI Researcher Giving Her Field Its Bitter Medicine