Rachana Ananthakrishnan is Executive Director & Head of Products at the University of Chicago, and has a Joint Staff Appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. In her role at the university, she leads Globus (www.globus.org) department, which delivers research data management services and platform to national and international research institutions. She also serves on the WestGrid Board of Directors, and is a member of the InCommon Community Assurance and Trust Board.

Her work is focused on research and education field, and she has worked on security and data management solutions on various projects including Earth System Grid (ESG), Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Prior to that she worked on the Globus Toolkit engineering team and customer engagement teams, leading the efforts in web services and security technologies. Rachana received her MS in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.