The Takeda automation executive credits Harrisburg University’s applied analytics training as the foundation of the work honored at the 2026 American Business Awards.
HARRISBURG, PA — Bharadwaj “Brad” Popuri MS ’20, senior director and head of R&D automation at Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, has received a Bronze Stevie Award in the AI Strategy Vanguard category at the 2026 American Business Awards. Winners were celebrated June 9 at the program’s 24th annual awards gala at the Marriott Marquis in New York City.
More than 3,700 nominations were considered in this year’s competition, judged by more than 250 professionals worldwide whose average scores determined the winners. The AI Strategy Vanguard category falls under the AI Waymakers Awards, which are evaluated by their own dedicated judging committee. Popuri, who earned his master’s degree in analytics at HU, was honored for work he describes as “bringing modern AI into one of the most heavily regulated corners of the economy: pharmaceutical R&D.”
Solving Longstanding Industry Challenges
“The story is less about a trophy and more about a problem I’ve spent the last several years solving,” Popuri said.
At Takeda, Popuri leads the function that “designs, builds, and operates the automation ecosystem behind Takeda’s global clinical development” — what he calls “the systems that keep clinical trial data controlled, high-quality, and cost-effective.” Over the past three years, his teams have embedded robotic process automation, process mining, machine learning, and, most recently, agentic AI — including retrieval-augmented generation, agent orchestration, and LLM evaluation frameworks — directly into the clinical development lifecycle.
That work is subject to a level of oversight most AI teams never encounter. “Most enterprise AI lives where experimentation is cheap,” Popuri said. “In drug development, every model, prompt, and workflow must withstand FDA-grade scrutiny under 21 CFR Part 11.” Delivering production-grade agentic AI in that environment — “not in a sandbox but at enterprise scale” — is, he said, “some of the hardest work in biopharma AI today.”
Popuri’s record spans strategy, science, and code. Before Takeda, the portfolios he led delivered a return on the automation and AI/ML portfolio at IQVIA that earned the company’s CEO Award for Operational Excellence in 2024, along with a multimillion-dollar data modernization for a top-five pharmaceutical company and a statewide vaccine administration rollout at Deloitte. “I have worked as a data scientist, published as a biomedical researcher, and led as an executive,” he said. “That combination lets me design AI systems that are scientifically sound, commercially viable, and defensible to regulators.”
A Foundation Built at HU
“Harrisburg University is where that combination took root,” Popuri said.
He earned his master’s degree in analytics at HU in 2020, and the program’s applied model has carried into his research career: in 2024, he co-authored a peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences with fellow HU alumna Maria Vaida, PhD ’20, identifying a novel biomarker panel for breast cancer screening.
That line of inquiry is ongoing — and it has kept him on campus. Popuri is completing his doctorate at Harrisburg University, where his research focuses on metabolomics-based multi-cancer early detection using explainable machine learning.
He has also added executive credentials from Harvard Business School and Duke University, “but the foundation was built at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and by the people I found there,” he said — a community that includes his wife, Shalini, whom he met at Harrisburg.
“Brad’s recognition reflects exactly what Harrisburg University was built to do,” said Dr. Kevin Purcell, provost of Harrisburg University. “Our programs put students to work on real problems with real data from day one, and Brad has taken that training into one of the most demanding environments in industry. Applying AI inside the regulatory rigor of pharmaceutical R&D, and doing it at global scale, is a remarkable achievement. We are proud to count him among our alumni — and prouder still that he is back with us as a doctoral researcher, working on problems that matter.”
“Thank you, HU, for celebrating it with me,” Popuri said.
ABOUT HARRISBURG UNIVERSITY
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (HU) is an independent, nonprofit university offering degrees in advanced manufacturing, analytics, biotechnology, cybersecurity, nursing, and other critical fields. Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, HU serves a diverse student body through bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs that link research with practical applications. For information about HU’s affordable STEM degrees and professional development programs, call 717.901.5146 or email Connect@HarrisburgU.edu. Stay in the know by following Harrisburg University on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
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Do you have questions about this story? Interested in lining up an interview? Please contact Dan Wilhelm, Director of Communications for Harrisburg University, at DWilhelm@HarrisburgU.edu or 717.901.5100×1724.
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