Prior to joining Breakthrough Energy Ventures as a partner, Rajeev J. Ram served on the BEV scientific advisory board since 2018. He has been on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT since 1997. He served as a Program Director at the newly founded Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. At ARPAe, he developed the ADEPT program which accelerated the deployment of wide-bandgap semiconductors and the GENI program which worked to increase the grid’s capacity to host renewables.

He was educated as an applied physicist at Caltech and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He developed record brightness LED’s while at HP Labs, Palo Alto (LumiLEDs) and at MIT developed CMOS photonics, microscale bioreactors, swept source Raman analyzers, photonic architectures for trapped-ion quantum computers and atomic clocks, internal cooling of semiconductor devices, and optical biomarkers for early detection of plant stress. He is an IEEE Fellow and Optica Fellow and an MIT Bose Fellow and MacVicar Fellow and Hertz Fellow.

He co-founded erbi Biosystems (acquired by Merck KGaA in 2022) which develops microbioreactors for automated microbial and mammalian cell culture. He also co-founded Ayar Labs – backed by leading venture and corporate venture investors – that provides co-packaged photonic I/O for high-performance computing.