Ramakrishan is a political scientist and the founder and director of AAPI Data, a nationally recognized publisher of demographic data and policy research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, based at the Asian American Research Center, University of California, Berkeley. His current work focuses on projects related to equitable futures and innovative governance. He is the Strategy Lead for the Americas at School of International Futures, and Senior Advisor at States for the Future, and was named to the Frederick Douglass 200. Previously, he was Executive Director of California 100, a transformative statewide initiative focused on California’s next century. Ramakrishnan served as associate dean of University of California, Riverside’s School of Public Policy for four years and as a Professor of Public Policy at UC Riverside for nineteen years. He holds a BA in international relations from Brown University and a PhD in politics from Princeton.

Currently, Ramakrishnan serves on the Board of The California Endowment and on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee (NAC). Ramakrishnan has published many articles and seven books, including most recently, Citizenship Reimagined (Cambridge, 2020) and Framing Immigrants (Russell Sage, 2016), and has written dozens of op-eds and has appeared in nearly 3,000 news stories.