Faculty Wins Award for Trailblazing Work in Computing and Biology

Georgia Tech Regents’ Professor Srinivas Aluru is the recipient of the Charles Babbage Award for 2025. Aluru was awarded for pioneering research contributions that intersect parallel computing and computational biology.

“This is a very well-deserved recognition for Srinivas as he joins the illustrious list of past recipients of the Charles Babbage Award,” said Vivek Sarkar, the John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of the College of Computing.

“Srinivas’ accomplishments reflect positively on himself and all of us at Georgia Tech. This is indeed an occasion to celebrate.”

The IEEE Computer Society presents the Babbage Award annually. The award recognizes significant contributions to parallel computation. 

[Related: IEEE-CS interview with Aluru on his award-winning career]

The award is named after Charles Babbage, widely considered to be a “father of the computer.” Babbage and Ada Lovelace are credited with inventing the first mechanical computers in the 19th century, eventually leading to more complex designs.

Aluru is a pioneer in computational genomics, an area of biology that studies the order, structure, function, and evolution of genetic material. Throughout his career, his lab has developed software and algorithms to analyze the genomes of several species of plants, animals, and microorganisms.

Genome base pair sizes can number into the billions, which can be interpreted as massive datasets. Ever since the early years of his career, Aluru championed parallel computing as a practical approach to studying these challenging datasets. 

Parallelism divides a large problem into smaller ones, allowing different processors on a computer to solve the simpler tasks simultaneously. This approach breaks a genome into smaller segments, allowing computers to efficiently transcribe genetic code and identify insightful patterns. 

“Srinivas Aluru’s groundbreaking contributions have profoundly shaped the intersection of parallel processing and bioinformatics. His work is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Yves Robert, awards chair of the IEEE Computer Society Babbage Committee. 

“It is a privilege to recognize a researcher whose work will undoubtedly have a lasting impact for generations to come.”

IEEE selected Aluru as a fellow in 2010, and he recently served as the editor-in-chief of the journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. 

Aluru has fellowships with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a past recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the government of India.

Along with receiving the Babbage Award, Aluru’s leadership acumen earned him the recent appointment as senior associate dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. 

Aluru helped form the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) at Georgia Tech in 2016, serving as co-executive director. Later, he became the institute’s sole executive director from 2019 to 2025. Regents’ Professor C. David Sherrill became interim executive director of IDEaS when Aluru accepted his associate dean appointment.  

Aluru started at Georgia Tech in 2013 to join the new School of Computational Science and Engineering, established in 2010. He served as the School’s interim chair from 2019 to 2020. In 2023, the University System of Georgia appointed Aluru as Regents’ Professor.

Aluru completed his Ph.D. at Iowa State University in 1994. He then worked at Ames National Laboratory, Syracuse University, and New Mexico State University before returning to his alma mater from 1999 to 2013.

“This award is a recognition of over two and a half decades of research efforts in my group, reflecting not only my work but that of numerous graduate students and collaborators,” said Aluru. 

“I hope the award draws attention to the importance of parallel methods in computational biology and points key advancements to new entrants in the field.”