UCLA Samueli Announces 2025 Excellence in Teaching Awards

Each year, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering honors alumni, faculty, and students for outstanding achievements in their fields. The following profiles highlight recipients of the Eon Instrumentation Inc. Excellence in Teaching Award and the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award.

Eon Instrumentation Inc. Excellence in Teaching
Sriram Sankararaman
Professor, Computer Science, Human Genetics, 
Computational Medicine

Sriram Sankararaman is a professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli. He also holds joint appointments as a professor of human genetics and of computational medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He is a member of the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Graduate Program.

Sankararaman teaches upper-division and graduate courses that are in high demand, and has played a key role in curriculum development. As co-director of the bioinformatics minor, he has continually strengthened the program. His courses on machine learning and its applications are well-regarded by students across UCLA.

In addition to teaching, Sankararaman leads the Machine Learning and Genomics Lab, which develops and applies highly scalable statistical tools from computer science to analyze multidimensional human genome data. His research has identified disease-associated genes in humans, revealed interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, and developed guidelines for sharing genetic data without compromising privacy. 

His work has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the BBC. Sankararaman has received numerous awards for his discoveries, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, and fellowships from Microsoft Research, the Sloan Foundation, the Okawa Foundation and the UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows. He previously received the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, which is reserved for junior faculty at UCLA Samueli. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and his doctorate in computer science from UC Berkeley, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School.

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