Ramkumar Hariharan is the director of programs for the College of Engineering and the Data Science Faculty at Northeastern University. Based in Seattle, WA, he has been part of the university since 2018, holding both associate director and affiliated faculty positions.

Prior to joining NU, Hariharan was the Head of Applied Artificial Intelligence at MACRO-EYES, a venture-backed tech company that can claim to be the first major AI investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His role at this organization was to lead a dispersed team of supply-chain-focused data scientists, building on his experiences as a senior data scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Originally from India, Hariharan’s areas of focus include all aspects of human longevity, advanced statistical data analyses, data visualization, and machine learning. Hariharan has significant experience in building novel AI applications, with his research directed at using large and genomic datasets in biomedicine. He has been involved in the healthcare sector for some time, working with biomedical big data at both the Hood-Price Laboratory at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and at the Promislow Lab at the University of Washington.

His honors and awards include being the only British Council Researcher Exchange Program award winner in 2007 from India, a Young Scientist Award from the Government of India, and an invited external grants reviewer for the Governments of Poland and Hong Kong. Hariharan has also spent time as a visiting scientist at RIKEN, Japan, on collaborative projects at the University of Oxford, UK and at the A* Bioinformatics Institute in Singapore.

In addition to driving research and learning, he is a passionate science and technology communicator, and has a body of published work as a freelance columnist for The Hindu, India’s second-largest national daily newspaper. Away from science and academia, Hariharan enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, watching Chuck Lorre-directed sitcoms and local gastronomy.