Anima Anandkumar’s work may not control the weather, but it can predict it. The Caltech professor helped pioneer AI-powered techniques to model physical processes with lightning-fast speed—in some cases, more than a million times faster than prior methods. Her algorithms have since been used to forecast weather phenomena thousands of times faster than traditional methods, design novel medical devices and components for quantum computers, optimize a key step in computer chip manufacturing, conduct sustainable nuclear fusion simulations to one day safely harness their energy source, and much more.
In March, Anandkumar joined the United Nations Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board, helping to shape the U.N.'s scientific agenda and advising its leaders on AI. Her focus is on bringing balance and scientific grounding to conversations on how AI can benefit people across the world, particularly in the Global South, at a time when misinformation around the technology is rife.
She points, for example, to concerns that data centers will be used only for surveillance. “Yes, that is one possible future,” she tells TIME. “But if democracy is alive, we want to ensure they're used for other applications, like weather, climate, scientific discovery.”