Arun Chandran Natarajan joined the IDEAS Office in July 2023. He came to Rice from Johns Hopkins University, where he was the assistant vice provost for institutional research. He has nearly 20 years of combined experience in institutional research and business intelligence.

Arun began at Johns Hopkins in 2011 as a software engineer, senior programmer, and analyst. In 2016, he was promoted to director of institutional research and Information technology director. While at Johns Hopkins, Arun designed and developed a centralized institutional research database for compliance reporting and responding to university-wide queries. He collaborated on diversity reports, publishing postdoctoral program statistics, transforming the OIR website, analyzing master’s student debt, creating an annual recurrent research expenditure dashboard, benchmarking faculty salaries, and evaluating individual doctoral programs. Arun also oversaw the launch and analyzing the results of key surveys in collaboration with multiple offices and stakeholders.