Ramakrishna Venugopalan earned a BE in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering (1992) from Annamalai University in India, and a PhD (1998) in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). From 1998 to 2002 he was a tenure-track faculty member at the UAB, where he established and directed an industry-academia-government funded translational research program on minimally invasive devices (over a dozen implanted products in current clinical use, and nine MS and three PhD students graduated). He also consulted for over 20 companies; the engagements spanning technology/product/ process development to regulatory filing support.

He was recruited by Codman (the neurosurgical division for J&J) in 2002, and is currently their Senior Principal Engineer.At Codman he has lead R&D programs on passive/active implants and drug-device combinations. His general management expertise encompasses: managing an R&D team through reorganization, creating a resource management/prioritization process for concurrent product development efforts, providing decisive guidance on organic and inorganic opportunities and execution of a gap analysis on an underperforming multinational joint-venture.

Dr. Venugopalan has co-authored over 20 journal articles, three book chapters, three patents/disclosures and three international standards. He has reviewed NIH-SBIR grant proposals, is a Journal of Applied Biomaterials Editorial Board member, and chaired an ASM Biomaterials conference. He has received the Linn-Henley Outstanding Student Achievement Award and the Outstanding Engineering Faculty Award from UAB, and Global Standards of Leadership Award from Codman, J&J. He is currently a company-sponsored candidate in the Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership at MIT.