Rajeev Ram

Rajeev Ram has been on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT since 1997 where he holds the Clarence J. LeBel Chair. He was educated as an applied physicist at Caltech and the University of California, Santa Barbara where he held a Hertz Fellowship. Prior to coming to MIT, he contributed to the development of record brightness LED’s while at HP Labs, Palo Alto (LumiLEDs). He is an IEEE Fellow and Optica Fellow and an MIT Bose Fellow and MacVicar Fellow. He has served as an advisor to Breakthrough Energy Ventures since 2017. At MIT, he co-founded erbi Biosystems (acquired by Merck KGaA in 2022) which develops microbioreactors for automated microbial and mammalian cell culture. He also co-founded Ayar Labs that provides co-packaged photonic I/O for high-performance computing. He served as a Program Director at the newly founded Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPAe) and as an advisor to the Obama White House on electricity infrastructure. Since 2018, he has been co-Principal Investigator at the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology working closely with plant biologists at Temasek Lifesciences Laboratory to discover markers for plant stress and apply these markers to advancing indoor agriculture. He is also co-Principal Investigator in the MIT Climate Grand Challenge project focused on developing resilient staple crops by engineering plant-microbe interactions. He has served as Topic Editor for Frontiers in Plant Science special issue on non-destructive methods for monitoring plant health.