Nandini Ananth
Associate Professor
PDF California Institute of Technology
Ph.D. in Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley
M.Sc. in Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
ananth@cornell.edu

Nandini Ananth was born in Chennai, India. She attended Stella Maris College in Chennai,where she majored in chemistry and served as editor of the college newspaper in her senior year. After graduating at the top of her class with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, she joined the Masters program in chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Here she developed a strong interest in quantum mechanics and carried out research on implementing logic gates for quantum computing using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance under the guidance of N. Chandrakumar. During this time she also received a Summer Research Fellowship from the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research and was introduced to semiclassical dynamics in K. L. Sebastian’s group at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. This further solidified her interest in theoretical chemistry and chemical dynamics.

Nandini moved to the United States in the fall of 2003 to pursue doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley in William Miller’s group, working on developing semiclassical methods to model quantum dynamical behavior in complex chemical reactions. Upon graduation, she accepted a position as postdoctoral scholar in Thomas Miller’s group at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where her research focused on developing path-integral methods for the simulation of electronically nonadiabatic processes in the condensed phase. She joined the faculty of the department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University in the Fall of 2012, and during her time here has received the Cottrell Scholar Award, NSF CAREER Award, NSF EAGER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and Army Research Office’s Young Investigator Award. As of July 1st, 2018, Nandini was officially promoted to Associate Professor with indefinite tenure.