He is also a founder of AAPI Data and the UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation, and has been the Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy.
He studies the political behavior and engagement of immigrants to the United States, and manages projects to gather data about minority groups in America.
He was the solo author of Democracy in Immigrant America: Changing Demographics and Political Participation (2005), which Pei-te Lien called "an unprecedented effort systematically to study political participation by immigrants and their offspring, across generations and major racial and national-origin groups".
[4] Ramakrishnan has founded and directed multiple projects related to data acquisition on minority groups in the US, including the National Asian American Survey,[5] the AAPI Data project to collect information about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the US,[6] and the Inland Empire 2020 Census Complete Count Committee, an effort in San Bernardino County and Riverside County to raise awareness and conduct outreach to hard-to-count populations by the US Census.
[15][16] Ramakrishnan has served as a member of the U.S. Census Bureau's National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations,[17] as chair of the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs,[18] and as President of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.