Shankar Subramaniam is a professor of bioengineering, bioinformatics and systems biology; computer science and engineering; cellular and molecular medicine; and nanoengineering. He was chair of the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) Bioengineering Department from 2008 to 2013.  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 UC San Diego. He holds adjunct professorships at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He is a professor at the Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling at Johns Hopkins University. 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, as well as the director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and co-director of the W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Dr. Subramaniam is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and recipient of Smithsonian Foundation and Association of Laboratory Automation Awards. In 2013, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2002, he received the Genome Technology All Star Award. In 2008, he was awarded the Faculty Excellence in Research Award at UC San Diego. In 2011, he was appointed as a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. His research spans several areas of bioinformatics and systems biology.