Distinguished Professor Shankar Subramaniam, University of California San Diego, to Present Showcase[C+X] Talk October 3

Showcase[C+X] logo

Shankar Subramaniam, a distinguished professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego, will present a lecture on Thursday, October 3, 2024, from 12:30-1:30 pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom. Lunch will be served.

The title of Subramaniam’s talk is “Is Big Data the sine qua non of Human Future? Challenges at the interface of Data and Life Sciences.”

The talk is part of Showcase[C+X] presented by the College of Computing and the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems October 2-4.

Subramaniam will also be available to meet with faculty, staff, and students all day on Wednesday and on Thursday morning. Please contact Vicky Roy to schedule a time to meet.

Speaker Bio

Shankar Subramaniam is a distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Cellular & Molecular Medicine, and Nanoengineering, and Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Systems Biology at the University of California San Diego. He was the founding Director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Interdisciplinary Program. He was named a distinguished scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2010. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a recipient of the UCSD Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence, and Genome All Star, Smithsonian Foundation and Laboratory Automation awards. Subramaniam received a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Subramaniam’s innovative work has had a major impact on research and development in academia and industry by allowing the synthesis of complex biological and medical information from genes and molecules into integrated knowledge at cellular and system levels, thus providing important basis for drug discovery and innovation. He was a pioneer in bioinformatics with his development of the Biology Workbench, the first of its kind in web based infrastructures. He has fostered training and research in systems biology and bioinformatics at the national level, serving on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee on Bioinformatics and played a key role in the formulation of the NIH Director’s Roadmap which places a major emphasis on the use of quantitative approaches of engineering to biomedical research in health and disease.

He has been instrumental in raising national awareness of the roles of these engineering approaches to biomedical research. He founded the UCSD Bioinformatics program and was Chair of the nationally top-ranked bioengineering program from 2008-2013. Subramaniam has collaborated with colleagues in clinical medicine to elucidate the molecular and genomic basis of the pathogenesis of diabetes, inflammation, atherosclerosis, and myopathies by using modern approaches of systems biology and bioinformatics to analyze physiological and pathophysiological data, leading to the development of novel therapeutic measures and drug discovery.

Subramaniam has made innovative contributions at the interface of engineering and medicine. In addition to inventing new methods for analysis of complex systems, he pioneered a novel technology for RNA sequencing with the smallest quantities of RNA leading to our ability to analyze human tissues at the microscale. His contributions to models of human disease are wide and profound and have strong implications for precision and personalized systems medicine.