Dr. Piyush Puranik is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the International Gaming Institute, UNLV. He serves as the Lead Data Scientist for the AI Research Hub (AiR HUB), studying machine learning and data science to detect behavioral indicators of gambling addiction and sub-clinical gambling disorders. He also manages the core AI research infrastructure supporting these advanced modeling efforts. Dr. Puranik was an editor of the inaugural The State of AI in Gaming 2026 report and serves as an Associate Editor for the UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNLV, with a research specialization in mining behavioral patterns from complex datasets.