Somali Chaterji (pronounced shoh-MAH-lee CHA-ter-jee) is an
Assistant Professor in Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE)
and in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE, by courtesy). Dr.
Chaterji is also the founder and CEO of a blazing fast cloud computing company, KeyByte (from
2021). Dr. Chaterji leads ICAN, the Innovatory of Cells and Neural Machines, at Purdue. She did
her PhD in Biomedical Engineering (BME) from Purdue, winning the Chorafas Dissertation Award and
the Future Faculty Fellowship, followed by a postdoc in UT Austin and then a Visiting Assistant
Professor stint in Purdue Computer Science. She won the NSF CAREER award from the Computing
Directorate (CISE, CNS) in January 2022. Her work has appeared at the top applied machine
learning, computer systems, and computational genomics conferences and journals. She has
received funding from NIH (R01), DOD (ARL), NSF (CISE-CNS, CAREER), NIFA, as well as private
industries like Amazon and Adobe Research. Dr. Chaterji also goes by her childhood alias Sonata
Chaterji, Sonata from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata that her mom loves.