Padma Raghavan is the Vice Provost for Research and Innovation and Chief Research Officer, Senior Advisor to the Chancellor, and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. 

As Vice Provost for Research and Innovation, Raghavan oversees the advancement of the university’s research and innovation portfolio, including technology transfer and commercialization spanning the university and medical center as well as the development of strategic partnerships. Such partnerships include Ancora Innovation, with Deerfield Management to accelerate the development and delivery of life-changing therapeutics from bench to patient, as well as Army Pathfinder, a program to rapidly advance mission-critical science and technology. 

In her faculty role, Raghavan specializes in high-performance computing (aka supercomputing), focusing on developing algorithms for scalable, fault-tolerant, and energy-efficient computing. She has authored over one hundred peer-reviewed publications and supervised nearly fifty M.S and Ph.D. theses. Raghavan has received several recognitions including the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, and elevation to Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is also active in the profession, currently serving on the advisory committees Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation, and on the Board of Governors of UT-Battelle, which operates the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2022, Raghavan was appointed to a two-year term on the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science. 

Prior to joining Vanderbilt in 2016 from the Pennsylvania State University, Raghavan served as the Associate Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives, the founding Director of the university-wide Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, and as Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.