Raman, a Ph.D. in statistics, is a core quantitative investigator specializing in analytics, research design and using statistical logic to understand natural phenomena. He loves playing with data and drawing scientifically and logically valid inferences from numbers. He enjoys talking to numbers and feels they are the best friends one can have. He spent a good deal of time, almost 21 and half years, as a scientist with Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, starting off as a statistician in Institute of Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding, Coimbatore, one of the 9 research institutes under the umbrella of ICFRE. There he conversed with data generated from experiments in bio-technology, agro-forestry, genetics, tree breeding. He also designed experiments and surveys related to these fields. In 2003, he joined ICFRE HQ on transfer and worked with ADG (Statistics), finally creating a Division of Forestry Statistics in the HQ in 2013 and headed it till 2019. During his time there he prepared the flagship Forestry Statistics India, led writing of the first two Forest Sector Reports for the forestry sector of India. He also led projects funded by national (MoEF, CSO, NOVOD Board) and international organizations (ITTO) apart from being a part of teams made for REDD+, climate change issues. He has widely taught research methodology and using statistical techniques to stakeholders (teachers, students, researchers, etc.) belonging to a wide spectrum like environment, ecology, medicine, pharmacy, education, economics, etc. These interactions helped in developing domain expertise in these areas which now help him to look beyond just analytics and dive into the deeper aspects like climate change methodologies, medicinal procedures, law, etc. leading to interpretation of analytics embedded with domain knowledge.

To fulfil his creative side, he led a project to establish the photo-gallery of FRI in its city centre, which has now been shifted to the FRI campus. He has written books, edited publications and has over 30 research papers related to core statistics and statistical applications in chemistry, ecology, bio-technology and other forestry disciplines. He left ICFRE in August 2019 to start his own venture The EV Research (EV being the short form of En ventre, a term coined by serendipity). His dream is to develop a consultancy and incubating enterprise to promote entrepreneurship among the youngsters to turn them into job-providers from job-seekers.

His skills include multivariate analysis, sampling, optimizing process parameters using designed experiments and anything that involves numbers. He is proficient in using statistical software like SPSS, STATISTICA, SYSTAT, MINITAB and others.

He loves teaching and can stand for hours delivering lectures on statistics and also narrates jokes on statistics and statisticians. He believes statistics is much ahead of data science. To quote him all statisticians are data scientists but not all data scientists are statisticians. It’s just not how you analyze data, but how you collect them that matters. Small data needs more attention that big data and lot of creativity is needed to analyze small and insufficient data sets than huge data sets. His eyes shine up when he sees numbers and goes into a trance to talk to them.

He is an avid reader occasional writer, love riding bike, travels and takes refuge in music (harmonica being his favourite instrument) when he wants to escape the vagaries of the world.

His favourite books related to numbers include Statistics and Truth by C.R. Rao, How to lie using statistics, God created integers, Math with bad drawings