Ram Subramaniam
Vice President Ram Subramaniam is a veteran educator who began his community college career as a chemistry instructor at De Anza, before holding administrative and senior leadership positions at Foothill College and Hartnell College.
He returned to De Anza as vice president in June 2025, after serving as vice president of Student Success and Teaching Excellence at Hartnell, where he led the effort to clear barriers for students by realigning academic divisions around Guided Pathways meta-majors. Working closely with instructional deans and student services, he also implemented an annual course schedule that allows students to enroll in a full year of classes in advance.
While at Hartnell, Subramaniam established new offices of Workforce Development and Distance Education, diversified the academic leadership team, oversaw new Zero Textbook Cost initiatives to lower expenses for students, and spearheaded the development of a districtwide infrastructure for professional learning.
Before he joined Hartnell in 2023, Subramaniam was dean of STEM programs at Foothill, where he also served as acting associate vice president of Instruction. In those positions, he led a comprehensive redesign of the program review process and developed institutional resource allocation guidelines.
Also at Foothill, Subramaniam oversaw transformation of the Science Learning Institute into an equity-focused program supporting historically marginalized students in STEM; worked to expand dual enrollment across multiple school districts; and launched a credit-bearing certificate pathway for incarcerated learners in partnership with Elmwood Correctional Facility.
Earlier, Subramaniam taught chemistry at De Anza for nine years and served as department coordinator and curriculum committee co-chair. One of his proudest achievements there was creating an open-access lab manual for the General Chemistry sequence, which is still in use. He has also taught at Santa Clara University and Hamilton College.
Subramaniam earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in chemistry from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India, followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Kentucky, where he studied biochemical markers of Alzheimer’s disease. Subramaniam also served as a post-doctoral fellow in biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University.