Bharath Kumar Bolla

Bharath Kumar Bolla is an Associate Director of MLOps and Data Science at Novartis, where he leads a cross-functional team of ML engineers and MLOps specialists, driving the AI/ML strategy for commercial analytics across 11 European markets and 25+ product lines. His mandate spans end-to-end ML platform architecture, production pipeline automation, and the integration of generative AI capabilities into enterprise workflows, translating complex data science initiatives into measurable commercial impact at scale. Prior to Novartis, he held senior data science and leadership roles at Salesforce, Verizon, and Emory University, spanning recommendation systems, NLP, pricing optimization, and clinical research, with over 15 years of experience bringing AI from proof-of-concept to production across regulated and high-stakes industries. Bharath has authored Large Language Model Recipes (Apress, 2026), a hands-on guide to fine-tuning, optimization, and deployment of LLMs, and has published close to 30 peer-reviewed papers across computer vision, NLP, and forecasting domains, accumulating over 250 citations. He has delivered 9+ invited talks at conferences and forums including the Machine Learning Developers Summit, Deep Learning Developers Conference, Analytics Vidhya Data Hour series, the AABS African Deans and Directors Forum, and the Future Tech Summit, where he received the Emerging Leader Award. He has served as sole or co-technical reviewer for five published books in AI and explainability. He holds an MS in Data Science from the University of Arizona and an Executive MBA in Product Management from the Institute of Product Leadership. He was recognized among Analytics India Magazine's 40 Under 40 Data Scientists (2022) and received the AI Changemaker Impact Award from 3AI. His current research interests include mechanistic interpretability applied to clinical language models, post-training alignment methods, and agentic AI architectures.