Kavita Ramanan is the Roland George Dwight Richardson University Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, and an Associate Director with the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), having also previously served as Deputy Director. She is currently the Associate Chair of the Division of Applied Mathematics from 2017, and served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2011--2014.
She works in the area of probability theory and stochastic processes, and has made fundamental contributions to several fields, including the theory of large deviations, stochastic analysis, interacting particle systems, high-dimensional probability and the analysis of stochastic networks. She was awarded the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society in 2006 and a Medallion from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2015. She is an elected Fellow of several societies, including the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She was awarded the Simons Fellowship in 2018 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Natural Sciences in 2020. She was also a recipient of the Newton Award from the Department of Defense in 2020.
Kavita Ramanan received her Ph.D. from the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University in 1998. After a post-doctoral position at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, she joined the Mathematical Sciences Center of Bell Laboratories, Lucent, as a Member of Technical Staff. In 2003, she returned to academia and was an Associate Professor, and later Professor, at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, from 2003-2009. She joined Brown University as a Professor of Applied Mathematics in 2010.
She has served as Area Editor for Mathematics of Operations Research, and on the Editorial Board of numerous journals, including the Annals of Probability, Annals of Applied Probability, SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Optimization, and Stochastic Models.
She is an elected member of the councils of the Insitute of Mathematical Statistics and Association for Women in Mathematics and the Nominations Committee of the American Mathematical Society. She is on the Scientific Advisory Board of ICERM (Institute of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics) and the Oxford-Imperial Centre for Doctoral Training. She has a passion for math outreach, and heads a group called the Math CoOp that aims to popularize mathematics at different levels. She served as narrator and script consultant for a film called "Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Mathematician and his Legacy". She is a corresponding editor for the Mathematics Magazine "Bhavana".
