Dr. Nandini Kannan is a Professor and Director of the Data Science Institute at Plaksha University. She most recently served as the Executive Director of the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF), a binational organization established by the Indian and U.S. governments to catalyze collaborations between the S&T communities. At IUSSTF, she aided new initiatives to support R&D collaborations in critical areas such as COVID-19 and Clean Energy.
Dr. Kannan brings leadership experience in both academia and government, an understanding of the critical role that science and technology play in this global inter-connected society, and a deep commitment to education and workforce development. She has spent over 20 years in academia, first as a faculty member and then as the Chair, Department of Management Science and Statistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). During her tenure at UTSA, she helped to develop new undergraduate and graduate programs and led a university-wide initiative on quantitative literacy.
Dr. Kannan has served as Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) where her responsibilities included core disciplinary research, mathematical sciences research institutes, and workforce development programs in the Division of Mathematical Sciences as well as a number of cross-directorate and cross-agency activities. She was co-chair for several Data Science related activities in support of Harnessing the Data Revolution, one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas, and created new programs to support data science foundations as well as data-intensive research in different science and engineering domains. She helped forge partnerships with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support collaborative efforts in biomedical data science.
Dr. Kannan received her BSc in Statistics from Presidency College, Chennai and an MSc degree in Statistics from the University of Madras before joining the Indian Statistical Institute as a Junior Research Fellow. She received an MS in Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh, and a PhD in Statistics from The Pennsylvania State University under the supervision of Professor C. Radhakrishna Rao. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.
