From Mysore to a career in AI

Anandkumar was born in Mysore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, into a family with deep academic roots. Her parents both worked as engineers, her grandfather was a mathematician, and her great-grandfather was a scholar of Sanskrit. Yet her early life was not confined to books and equations alone. She trained for years in Bharatanatyam, a classical form of Indian dance, and performed it regularly as a young woman.

Her formal academic path began at IIT Madras, where she completed her BTech in electrical engineering in 2004. She then travelled to the United States to pursue a PhD at Cornell University, finishing in 2009. During those years, she held an IBM Fellowship that supported her research.

Early career at MIT and Amazon

After completing her doctorate, Anandkumar joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher. There, she worked on new approaches to understanding machine learning and complex systems, laying the groundwork for much of her later research.

She went on to join Amazon Web Services as a Principal Scientist, where she played a central role in building and launching Amazon SageMaker, a platform that has since become widely used for machine learning work across the industry.

Joining Caltech and NVIDIA

In 2017, Anandkumar took up a professorship at Caltech. A year later, she also became Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA, taking on both academic and industry roles at once.

Her research has centred on a method known as Neural Operators, which allows AI models to understand and simulate physical processes at different scales, something that once required the power of supercomputers.

The impact of her research

@TIME right on the heels of the public launch of our company Accelerated Understanding @accelerated_u

Bringing the power of AI+Science together has been the focus of my life for the past decade. I believe the… pic.twitter.com/h01RcqQ8PZ

— Prof. Anima Anandkumar (@AnimaAnandkumar) August 27, 2026

She explained that this journey began with the invention of Neural Operators at Caltech, which became the foundation for a weather model called FourCastNet, built with her team at NVIDIA. She has since applied the same approach to nuclear fusion research, quantum chemistry and medical device design. Looking ahead, she said she is “particularly excited about self-improvement,” pointing to how physics-based models can check and improve their own results rather than depending only on lab data.

A seat on the UN’s scientific advisory board

In March this year, Anandkumar was appointed to the United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board. In this role, she helps shape the UN’s scientific agenda and advises its leadership on artificial intelligence. TIME reports that her focus is on keeping conversations about AI grounded in science, particularly for countries in the Global South, at a time when misinformation about the technology is widespread.

Speaking to TIME, she addressed concerns that data centres will end up being used mainly for surveillance. She acknowledged that this is one possible future, but said that if democratic systems remain strong, data centres can also serve other purposes, including weather forecasting, climate research and scientific discovery.

Anandkumar has also received the IEEE Fellowship, the Alfred P Sloan Fellowship and the NSF Career Award, adding to a long list of recognitions for her contributions to science.