Barath is a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. He is a John F. Kennedy Fellow, a Belfer Young Leader and a Fulbright Scholar. Barath began his career in the Singapore Foreign Service. In addition to tracking the watershed 2016 US Presidential Election, he has worked on US-China strategic competition in areas spanning national security, trade and technology. These include tracking US-China tensions in the South China Sea, leading on WTO disputes between the US and China at the height of the US-China Trade War, as well as monitoring the US-China tech rivalry.   

More recently, he spearheaded the development of deep-tech standards in areas straddling AI, Cybersecurity, IoT and Quantum Computing at Singapore’s largest economic agency. Barath was also a part of the founding team for the first and only pan-Asian trade association, where he advocated on a range of digital issues for its 3,000 members across 29 countries in Asia-Pacific.   

Barath previously served in the Singapore Armed Forces, in its equivalent of the US Marine Corps, as a Captain and graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Political Science.