Lavanya Ramakrishnan

Lavanya Ramakrishnan is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She started at the Lab in 2009 as an Alvarez Fellow and has also served as group lead for the Usable Software Systems group. Ramakrishnan has over 15 years of experience working on grants funded from various federal agencies including DOE, NSF, DOD, DARPA in various roles. Her research interests are in building software tools for computational and data-intensive science with a focus on workflow, resource, and data management. More recently, she has been using user research methods to understand as well as verify/validate the context of use and social challenges that often impact tool design and development. She currently leads a number of project teams that consist of a mix of social scientists, software engineers, and computer scientists.

Ramakrishnan has also worked closely with scientists from multiple domains including bioinformatics, biomedical science, storm-surge modeling, weather modeling, high-energy physics, and light source facilities. She has previously worked as a research staff member at Renaissance Computing Institute and MCNC in North Carolina. She has an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University and a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai. She joined Berkeley Lab as an Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in 2009.