About
Suresh Marru is a researcher, open source leader, entrepreneur, and mentor whose work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational science, and national-scale cyberinfrastructure. He leads the ARTISAN Center at Georgia Tech, a joint center between the College of Computing and the Institute for Data Engineering and Science, dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery through AI.
His career is defined by three parallel commitments: building open, reusable research infrastructure for the national scientific community; translating academic research into real-world products and companies; and investing deeply in the growth of students and early-career professionals.
Current Focus: Building platforms that lower friction from local → campus → national resources, enabling reproducible AI+science workflows at scale.
Research & ARTISAN Center
ARTISAN aims to accelerate advances in science and engineering by integrating cutting-edge AI techniques. The center fosters interdisciplinary research, cultivates the next generation of AI experts, and develops innovative solutions to complex challenges, from protein folding to materials science.
Cyberinfrastructure & Distributed Systems
Scalable, high-performance distributed systems that power AI and scientific research, from efficient data processing to computation at national scale.
AI-Driven Solutions for Science
Specialized AI/ML approaches tackling large-scale problems in protein modeling, quantum chemistry, climate modeling, and neuroscience.
Interpretable AI for Discovery
AI systems that not only make accurate predictions but provide meaningful, human-understandable insights contributing to the development of scientific theories.
Science Gateway Architectures
User-centric, evolvable architectures enabling researchers to compose and execute complex workflows across heterogeneous computing resources.
Current Projects
Nexus
Georgia Tech's next-generation AI supercomputer with a universal interface for composing workflows and scaling seamlessly from local to national resources.
nexus.gatech.edu ↗Cybershuttle
User-facing cyberinfrastructure providing seamless access to local, university, cloud, and NSF national computing resources, built on Apache Airavata.
cybershuttle.org ↗Custos
Open source security middleware for the science gateway community — federated authentication via CILogon, credential management, group hierarchies, and audit logging.
VizFold
Making AlphaFold and protein-folding models interpretable, visual, and explainable through interactive browser-based exploration integrated with Cybershuttle.
vizfold.github.io ↗SciGaP
Science Gateways Platform as a Service — rapid development and stable hosting for science gateways with user management, workflow execution, and archiving services.
scigap.org ↗Open Source Advocacy
Open source software is not just a development methodology — it is a philosophy about how publicly-funded research infrastructure should be built and governed. As an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation and VP & PMC Chair of Apache Airavata, Suresh leads one of the most widely adopted open source platforms in computational science.
Apache Software Foundation
Elected Member & VP of Apache Airavata. Shepherded multiple projects through the Apache Incubator, including Spark, Stratos, jclouds, SIS, and Open Climate Workbench.
Apache Airavata
Top-Level Apache project for managing and executing computational workflows across distributed resources. Deployed at 30+ major research institutions, supporting millions of jobs annually.
airavata.apache.org ↗Cybershuttle
An open-source cyberinfrastructure platform that enables seamless execution of scientific workflows across laptops, cloud platforms, and HPC systems.
GitHub ↗Google Summer of Code
Organization Administrator & Mentor for the Apache Software Foundation across 20+ years, actively growing the next generation of open source contributors worldwide.
GSoC at Apache ↗Entrepreneurship & Technology Translation
One of the most important, and undervalued, roles a researcher can play is building a clear pathway from academic discovery to real-world impact. The journey from published result to working product requires a different set of skills than research alone.
NSF / NIH / NASA
Apache Airavata
Science Gateways
Startups / Products
Researchers / Industry
Folia
- CTO — Bloomington, IN
Carduelis Technologies
- Co-Founder & CEO — Bloomington, IN
Datasprouts Corporation
- Co-Founder & CTO — Bloomington, IN
Mentoring & Teaching
Mentoring students and early-career professionals is a core part of how Suresh understands his role. He has directly supervised or co-supervised more than 38 graduate students across PhD and Master's programs, consistently creating environments where students work on real, deployed systems with national impact.
Courses at Georgia Tech
- 2023–Present — VIP: Airavata 2.0
Courses at Indiana University
- 2018–Present — Applied Distributed Systems (Graduate)
- 2016–2017 — Science Gateway Architectures
- Fall 2022 — Data Analysis in Criminal Justice II
- Fall 2014 — Management of Big & Complex Data
Selected Publications
11 representative works from 145+ total. Full bibliography: ORCID ↗ · Google Scholar ↗