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Doctor Raghu Ramakrishnan will leave the land of badgers and Big Ten football for the opportunity to serve as a research fellow in Yahoo! Research.

Ramakrishnan joins Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan, another impressive hire Yahoo made a year ago for its Research division. As a vice-president and research fellow, Ramakrishnan will report to Raghavan in Sunnyvale.

His expertise in database management systems and data mining technologies, combined with a focus on social search that mirrors Yahoo's strategy in that sector, will make Ramakrishnan a valuable addition to the company.

"The combination of Raghu's expertise and Yahoo!'s huge user base and data assets will provide tremendous insight into new ways to create value for our users," said Raghavan.

During his stint as chairman and CTO of QUIO, a company he co-founded, Ramakrishnan worked on online collaborative customer support and knowledge management projects. He most recently served as a professor of computer science and a co-founder of the Data Mining Institute at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That expertise will find its way into Yahoo's social communities. Yahoo's acquisitions and development efforts over the past year have centered on social media; it recently promoted the Yahoo Answers community site with participation from luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Bono.

Ramakrishnan spoke to WebProNews briefly about his new position, and noted that Answers would be a project that he will likely work on initially; he also mentioned Delicious and Flickr. Plenty of other opportunities, both in academia and the private sector, avidly sought his services.

But Yahoo managed to make the best case for his services. "Yahoo has far and away the most vibrant research program," Ramakrishnan said. That plus its status as a major Internet company, with plenty of data for a gifted researcher to work with, sealed the deal and brought him to the company.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.