He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a masters degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a bachelors degree from the Regional Engineering College at Tiruchirappalli, India. Shanmugasundaram's research interests include Internet data management, database systems and query-processing in emerging system architectures. He is the author of several publications and patents, and his research ideas have been implemented in commercial data management products.