Profile
“I want to use the human genome to answer fundamental questions about evolution and to understand how changes in the genome lead to disease.”
Dr. Sriram Sankararaman is interested in questions at the interface of computer science, statistics, and biology. Dr. Sankararaman develops statistical and computational methods to make sense of complex, high-dimensional datasets that are being generated in the fields of genomics and medicine to answer questions ranging from how humans have evolved to what are the biological underpinnings of diseases to how we can improve the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. To pursue these questions, he develops and extend tools from a diverse set of disciplines including machine learning, algorithms, optimization, high-dimensional statistics, and information theory. His work has led to the identification of disease genes in diverse populations, such as African Americans and Latinos; to the discovery of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals; and guidelines for how genetic data can be shared without compromising privacy. Dr. Sankararaman earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the Okawa Foundation grant, the UCLA Hellman fellowship, the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, a Simons Institute fellowship, and a Harvard Science of the Human Past fellowship as well as the Northrop-Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award at UCLA. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
He has appointments in three departments: Computer Science, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics.