Special Faculty

Armaghan "Rumi" Naik 

Executive Director, Future of the Engineering and Science of Automation Initiative
CEO, Avronna, Inc.
Partner, White & Naik

Armaghan “Rumi” Naik, PhD recently re-joined Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as the Executive Director, Future of the Engineering and Science of Automation Initiative. In parallel, he is the CEO of Avronna Inc., a firm building a general engineering intelligence to accelerate and drive quality in computer chip design and verification; and a partner at White & Naik, a consulting firm specializing in preparing companies for an AI everywhere world.

Prior to founding Avronna in 2022, Rumi was an Operating Partner at Flagship Pioneering and President of Metaphore Therapeutics (as FL72), and from 2016-2020 an Associate Vice President and Head of Digital at Sanofi.

At Sanofi, he built the team that made the first end-to-end completely AI designed vaccines - these vaccines were clinically tested (ClinicalTrials.gov/study/NCT04144179) and were up to twice as efficacious as the standard of care influenza vaccine. His team also developed the in-clinical development lead candidate vaccines for hMPV and PIV3 vaccines. We were the first to explain "machine learning" to the FDA's CBER in an IND.

Prior to Sanofi, Rumi was a Lane Fellow and special faculty at Carnegie Mellon, taught machine learning and biology laboratory classes, and was an accomplished molecular & cell biologist. Rumi’s PhD thesis in the automation of biological research was a watershed moment - the first time active learning drove novel experimentation without a human in the loop.

Rumi worked at Intel before his PhD where he pioneered symbolic reasoning techniques. His Intel career spanned several volume processor generations of the Core i7 and Pentium 4. Rumi is proud to be a Bloomberg LP alumnus and contributed to the invention of the Bloomberg Fair Value of Bonds (<BVAL> on the Bloomberg Terminal).

Rumi is a perpetual servant to his alma mater (MCS’02, SCS’13).