Dr. Shankar Subramaniam of University of California San Diego

Metrics of cognition such as dementia provide the first clues to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. What are the early events that presage the onset of dementia? How is the brain reprogrammed in Alzheimer’s disease? Is there a hope of reversing Alzheimer’s disease? Do other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s show similar reprogramming? Do mechanisms of reprogramming offer a strategy for drug screening? Can we develop human brain models for AD? This talk will address these issues from molecular and cellular perspectives.

Biography:

Shankar Subramaniam is a Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Computer Science and Engineering and Nano Engineering. He was the Chair of the Bioengineering Department at the University of California at San Diego (2008-13). He holds the inaugural Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Systems Biology. He was the Founding Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the University of California at San Diego. Prior to moving to UC San Diego, Dr. Subramaniam was a Professor of Biophysics, Biochemistry, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Chemical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
In 2023, he was elected as a Fellow of IEEE. In 2020 he was elected as a Fellow of IAMBE and in 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of AAAS. In 2002 he received the Genome Technology All Star Award. He is a fellow of the AIMBE and is a recipient of Smithsonian Foundation and Association of Laboratory Automation Awards and his research work is described below. In 2019 he was elected as the diamond jubilee distinguished alumni by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. In 2008 he was awarded the Faculty Excellence in Research Award at the University of California at San Diego. In 2011 he was appointed as a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In 2019 he was awarded the diamond jubilee Distinguished Alumni Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He has served on the External Advisory Boards for several Bio/Biomedical Engineering Departments including Johns Hopkins U., Case Western Reserve U., U. Penn, Rice U., and UT Austin. He is currently an overseas advisor for the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India. In 2012, he was elected as the Chair of the College of Fellows of AIMBE. He also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Janssen Pharmaceuticals (the research arm of Johnson and Johnson). He has served on the Scientific Councils of NIGMS and NHGRI (NIH Institutes) and as a Chair of three distinct study sections at the National Institutes of Health. Subramaniam has graduated over 80 Ph.D. students who occupy leading academic and industrial positions. He has trained over 100 postdoctoral researchers. His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Chen Foundation.
Subramaniam's innovative work has 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.