Smruthi Karthikeyan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Engineering and Applied Science Division at Caltech. Her overarching objectives are to develop integrated wet-lab and multi-omic (DNA- ,RNA- , untargeted metabolomics) approaches to provide a systems-level understanding of complex microbial communities, their interactions and how these translate to biomarkers for environmental and human health. Her research aims to incorporate the above data to engineer microbiomes in the environment for sustainability and effective microbial resource management.

She was a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of California San Diego-School of Medicine in Rob Knight’s lab where she worked on developing techniques to provide a mechnaistic understanding of microbial community dynamics in complex ecosystems (2020-2022). However, the pandemic quickly put a new spin on her research. She was also the lead scientist for developing and implementing one of the largest SARS-CoV-2 wastewater genomic surveillance programs. Her methodology along with the downstream sequence deconvolution tool, now widely adapted, enabled early detection of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants over 2 weeks prior to first clinical detection and identified instances of cryptic transmission not captured by clinical surveillance. It also enabled rapid variant typing, identification of the impact of specific mutations on pathogen fitness and elucidated local person-to-person transmission networks from wastewater.

She obtained her PhD in in Environmental Engineering with a minor in Microbiology, Microbial Ecology and Computational Biology from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020. As a part of her PhD thesis in the Konstantinidis Lab she worked on developing integrated wet-lab and computational biology based approaches to model, predict and forecast recovery patterns in benthic ecosystems affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

She was a GoMRI (Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative) scholar from 2016-2019. She won the 2018 James D Watkins student award for excellence in research instituted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and the ASM (American Society for Microbiology) Student award in 2019. She was selected as a 2019 MIT Rising Star in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She was also chosen as one of ten “Scientists to Watch” in Science News SN10 in 2022.

Her research has been highlighted on CBS 60 minutes, TIME Magazine, Forbes, NBC Nightly News, Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, The Conversation, JAMA, Nature, Science, NIH, NSF Highlights amongst others.