Naren Ramakrishnan

Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor at Virginia Tech and leads AI & Machine Learning Research for Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus. He is the founding director of the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics and the Amazon-Virginia Tech Initiative in Efficient and Robust Machine Learning.

Naren's research interests span data science, forecasting, urban analytics, recommender systems, and computational epidemiology. He and his students have received more than 10 Best Paper Awards at leading data mining, AI, and data science conferences, an ACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award, and a Deployed Application Award from IAAI. Over the course of his career, he has mentored 36 PhD students and 25 MS students, who have gone on to positions in industry, startups, and academia.

Naren's work has been supported by AIRC, Army Research Office, DARPA, DHS, DOE, DOT&E, DTRA, IARPA, ICWERX, NEH, NIH, NSF, NSWC, ODNI, ONR, Amazon, Boeing, Ford, General Dynamics, General Motors, HP Labs, L3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Mayfair Group, NEC Labs, Northrop Grumman, Rolls-Royce, The Washington Post, and Verisign. His research has been featured in the NIH outreach publication Biomedical Computation Review, the National Science Foundation's Discoveries series, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, The Economist, Chronicle of Higher Education, and ACM TechNews.

He serves/has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and many other journals. He has served as both program chair and general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). Naren was an invited co-organizer of the NAE Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

Naren is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech.

He received his Ph.D. in computer sciences from Purdue University.

As an advior, Naren is proud of his students and their careers:

PhD graduates

2004: Saverio Perugini
2007: Deept Kumar
2009: Sriram Tadepalli
2009: Ying Jin
2010: Pilsung Kang (with Srinidhi Varadarajan)
2011: Debprakash Patnaik
2012: Yong Ju Cho
2012: Sheng Guo
2012: M. Shahriar Hossain
2014: Patrick Butler
2014: Samah Gad
2016: Marjan Momtazpour
2016: Prithwish Chakraborty
2016: Fang Jin
2016: Pejman Khadivi
2016: K.S.M. Tozammel Hossain
2016: Hao Wu (with A. Lynn Abbott)
2016: Huijuan Shao
2017: Wei Wang
2017: Saurav Ghosh
2018: Parang Saraf
2018: Yue Ning
2018: Rupinder Paul
2019: Yaser Keneshloo (with Chandan Reddy)
2020: Mohammed Raihanul Islam
2021: Rongrong Tao
2021: Sathappan Muthiah
2021: Sneha Mehta
2022: Subhodip Biswas
2022: Debanjan Datta
2022: Nikhil Muralidhar (with Anuj Karpatne)
2023: Whitney Hayes (with Ashley Reichelmann)
2024: Andreea Sistrunk
2024: Mandar Sharma
2025: Shengzhe Xu

MS (Thesis) graduates
2001: Batul J. Mirza
2002: Alex Verstak
2003: Atul Shenoy (with Srinidhi Varadarajan)
2003: Dmitry Shiraev (with Srinidhi Varadarajan)
2004: Dan Moisa
2004: Michael Heffner (with Srinidhi Varadarajan)
2004: Chris Williams
2004: Muthukumar Thirunavukkarasu (with Srinidhi Varadarajan)
2007: Joseph Aaron Gresock
2009: Clifford Conley Owens (with T.M. Murali)
2009: Don Conry
2010: Evan Maxwell
2012: Patrick Fiaux (with Chris North)
2014: Aravindan Mahendiran
2014: Sathappan Muthiah, eBay
2015: Nathan Self
2018: Sanket Lokegaonkar (with Jia-Bin Huang)
2020: Arjun Choudhry
2021: Kulendra Kumar Kaushal
2022: Gopikrishna Rathinavel
2023: Rutuja Murlidhar Taware
2025: Andrew Neeser
2025: Priya Pitre (with Xuan Wang)
2025: Aishwarya Kumaran