Bhaskaran Balakrishnan

Bhaskaran Balakrishnan is the Chief of Staff for the United States Copyright Office. He was appointed to the position effective December 1, 2024.

Balakrishnan supports the Register and the leadership team on a wide variety of strategic, operational, and policy matters across the Office and the Library of Congress. He also has executive responsibility for the Office’s technology strategy and initiatives.

Balakrishnan had been serving as Acting Special Advisor to the Register of Copyrights since June 2024. During that time, he worked on furthering the development of the Enterprise Copyright System (ECS) and launching a new term of the Copyright Public Modernization Committee.

Balakrishnan joined the Library in 2012 and held a variety of leadership and program management roles in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). Most recently, he was the Director, IT Partner Engagement, responsible for supporting service unit-level IT investment planning, IT program/project delivery, and end-user services.

Before joining the Library, Balakrishnan spent twenty years working in software engineering, product management, and academic research, with a focus on large-scale content processing and dissemination.

Balakrishnan holds a master’s degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics in India and was a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University.