Dharshan Kumaran (born 7 June 1975) is an English chess grandmaster who has retired from ranked tournaments and is a neuroscience researcher collaborating with leaders in that field.^[1] He won the World Under-12 Championship in 1986, won the World Under-16 Championship in 1991. He finished 3rd equal in the World Under-20 Championship in 1994 and competed in the highest level competitions as recently as 2001.

He works as a neuroscientist, specialising in research at DeepMind, an inter-body collaboration led by University College London.^[2] He has authored (mostly co-authored) 75 articles in this field as noted in Google scholar's library of papers in neuroscience (between 2003 and 2022).^[2] The most cited of these, namely by more than 20,000 articles, is '"Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning" which he co-authored in 2015 with others including V Mnih, K Kavukcuoglu, D Silver, AA Rusu, J Veness and MG Bellemare, a 4-page article in Nature in 2015.^[2]