Somali Chaterji (pronounced shoh-MAH-lee CHA-ter-jee) is an Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and College of Agriculture at Purdue University. She did her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue, winning the Chorafas Dissertation Award and the Future Faculty Fellowship. She followed this up with a Postdoc in Biomedical Engineering from UT Austin and another Visiting Assistant Professor stint in Computer Science from Purdue. During this time, she received her first NIH-R01 grant (from NIAID). She also received the Seed-for-Success Award from Purdue University's Excellence in Research Awards program in recognition of this NIH R01 award in 2016. This NIH award focused on developing cyberinfrastructure for the world's largest metagenomics repository, MG-RAST, housed in Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Essentially, this is what resulted in her innovations in cloud database technologies, optimizing performance normalized by cost. Read more about this innovation here and here, resulting in multiple patents and patent-pending technologies available for licensing by Purdue's Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC).

She leads ICAN, the Innovatory of Cells and Neural Machines, at Purdue. She has received funding from NIH (R01), DOD (ARL), NSF (CISE-CNS, CAREER), NIFA, as well as private industries like Amazon and Adobe Research. She is an Associate Editor of BMC Bioinformatics and of Frontiers in High Performance Computing (Cloud Computing). She also serves on the editorial board of the Computational and Structural Biotechnology journal. Dr. Chaterji routinely serves on Program Committees of prestigious conferences in IoT, computer systems, machine learning, and computational genomics like Usenix ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference), EuroSys (European chapter of ACM SIGOPS), HotStorage (Hot Topics in (Computational) Storage and File Systems), Middleware, ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning), NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), and HiCOMB (IEEE International Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology). She reviews for high impact journals in computer systems and genomics such as Transactions on Networking, Genome Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Scientific Reports, and the BMC Series. She won the CAREER award from NSF's Computing Directorate in January 2022. She was selected to participate in the 2023 Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering (JAFOE) symposium held in Tokyo.

Dr. Chaterji is a technology commercialization enthusiast and serves as the co-founder and CEO of KeyByte, a cloud computing startup. She has consulted for the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and leads efforts in curriculum design for applied machine learning. Dr. Chaterji developed three new courses for Data Engineering in IoT and Genomics—two 1-credit courses and one 3-credit course—funded by a USDA Higher Education Challenge grant initiated in 2020. Among her contributions, she launched “From Chips to Cloud: Machine Learning in IoT and Computer Systems,” a 3-credit hour course offered every spring, reflecting her expertise in edge platforms and approximate computer vision. In Spring 2022, she introduced a course on algorithms for IoT and computer vision, advancing research in edge computing and IoT systems. Additionally, she developed an independent study course, “Edge Computing and IoT,” in Fall 2022, enriching a cutting-edge data engineering curriculum for machine learning practitioners and data enthusiasts.

Dr. Chaterji is currently developing a new 3-credit course for the second Pan-Purdue online data science curriculum, which will be offered three times a year starting in Spring 2025. She will teach the inaugural iteration and continue as the instructor every spring thereafter. The Purdue University online Master of Science degree in Data Science offers flexible, advanced training tailored to fit work schedules, empowering executives to enhance their understanding of data science and apply insights to drive strategic growth in their organizations.

Somali also goes by her childhood alias Sonata Chaterji, Sonata from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata that her mom loves. Read more about her from this recent Purdue's CoE blog.

Here is a succinct vision statement for Dr. Chaterji's research, along with her lab's applied ML research thrusts. Here are short videos highlighting her research achievements (from 2020)—a legacy snapshot, with new videos to follow every five years or so to keep things fresh!