Murali Venkatraman

Senior Expert – AI and Partnerships

Dr. Murali Venkatraman is Senior Expert for AI and Partnerships at ENOWA, NEOM's energy and water company, where he has led AI, data analytics and university and government partnerships. He founded the Energy Cortex programme, which runs more than 15 projects with universities across the energy value chain and draws on KAUST expertise for ENOWA, and he builds research and development relationships with universities whose technologies can serve the company's energy and water domains. He brings more than 20 years of experience in data science, research and development, strategy and artificial intelligence. Before joining NEOM he was Head of Artificial Intelligence at SAAL.AI in Abu Dhabi. Earlier, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and spent more than eight years as a scientist at CSIRO in Australia. He is an Adjunct Professor at KAUST's Climate Change Centre and at Fahad Bin Sultan University in Tabuk, and has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications. He holds a PhD in mathematical modelling in chemical engineering, focused on energy storage, from the University of South Carolina, and an MS in Statistics from UNSW Sydney.