He is also a core faculty at the Initiative for Biological Systems Engineering. His research areas include bioinformatics, computational network biology, and systems biology/genomics in health and disease. Prior to joining IIT, Manikandan was a Staff Scientist in the Systems Genomics and Bioinformatics Unit at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science (with an emphasis in computational and genomic biology) from the University of California at Berkeley, and has also held a Sr. Research Scientist position at Merck Research Labs in Seattle and Boston.