About me

Anirudh Prabhu is a Research Scientist & Principal Investigator at the Earth and Planets Laboratory in the Carnegie Institution for Science. A data & information scientist by training Prabhu's research focuses on advancing data science by developing and applying analytics, and machine learning techniques, thus answering the biggest questions in science including but not limited to (i) understanding the evolution of Earth’s geosphere and biosphere, (ii) identifying and characterizing planetary kinds, and (iii) biosignature detection, (iv) understanding the role of information in complex evolving systems. Prabhu's current research applications include the fields of Mineralogy, Astrobiology, Paleobiology, Crystallography, and Planetary Science. Prabhu holds a PhD in Multidisciplinary Science from RPI. Prabhu’s PhD thesis work focused on developing a semi-automated methodology to create rules by identifying the important concepts in text data and the relationships between these concepts. 

Prabhu is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance and has been a member of the Data Science Team of both the Deep Carbon Observatory (https://deepcarbon.net/activity/data-science) and the 4D initiative (https://4d.carnegiescience.edu/) since 2016. He was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Geoscience Data Journal in January 2025 and serves in several leadership roles across the geoscience community, including being Chair of the GSA Geoinformatics and Data Science Division. In 2026, he was selected as a Mineralogical Society of America Distinguished Lecturer (Peter Buseck New Developments in Mineralogy and Petrology Lectures), recognizing his contributions to mineral informatics and the application of artificial intelligence in the Earth and planetary sciences. His research has been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2025 Andrei Borisovich Vistelius Research Award, the 2024 European Geosciences Union Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award, the IBM Global Student Fellowship, and RPI's Founder's Award of Excellence.

My Research Interests include : 

• Role of information in complex evolving systems

• Developing methods, models and algorithms to work with Small, Sparse and Heterogeneous Data. 

• Data-driven biosignature detection.

• Identifying and characterizing planetary kinds

• Data-driven approaches to characterizing the coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere