Dr. Geetha Saarunya, PhD, MS is an Assistant Professor with the Translational Center for Resuscitative Trauma Care in the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota, where she unites computational epidemiology and precision health to turn large scale data into actionable insights for trauma and other complex-disease care.
After earning degrees in engineering (BS), molecular biology (MS), and integrative biology (PhD), Dr. Saarunya returned to academia to start her PhD in 2016 following a six-year caregiving hiatus. She then received a two-year NIGMS fellowship designed to increase the number of women data scientists on clinical career paths, training in the laboratory of Dr. Nima Aghaeepour at Stanford University. There she refined multi-omics integration, feature engineering, and machine-learning methods to forecast patient trajectories from Genetics, Proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and immune-profiling datasets.
Over the past nine years Dr. Saarunya has generated and interrogated extensive high-dimensional omics and clinical datasets, identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets that advance both population-level risk prediction and patient-specific intervention.
Bachelor's in Technology , SRM University, 2008
Masters of Science, University of South Carolina , 2010
PhD, University of South Carolina, 2022
Dr. Saarunya's scholarship sits at the intersection of computational epidemiology and precision health, leveraging multi-mics integration, machine learning, and geo-temporal analytics to convert complex biomedical and population data into clinically actionable insights for trauma and chronic pain care.
2025 (September) – Invited poster presenter, American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST) Conference, Boston, MA — “Rural crash-trauma outcomes.”
2025 (July) – Invited poster presenter, Gordon Research Conference, Maine — “Biomarkers to stratify chronic pain in chronic pancreatitis.”
2021 – 2023 – NIGMS Postdoctoral Scholar (Increasing Women Data Scientists in Clinical Career Paths Fellowship), Stanford School of Medicine.
2019 – Graduate Scholar Award to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration, Houston, TX.
2016 – Travel grant recipient, American Society for Microbiology conference (poster presentation).
International Society of Computational Biology
Embedded in a Level I academic trauma center, Dr. Saarunya partners with acute/critical care surgeons, pain specialists, EMS agencies and, Public health officials to ensure data science directly informs bedside and system-level decision making processes. Current translational efforts include:
Curriculum leadership: Former instructor or TA for statistics, bioinformatics, microbiology, virology, and genetics, where she designed and taught courses with project and problem based learning framework.
Mentorship & community building: Co-founded the ISCB-RSG Southeast USA student chapter( Currently co-faculty mentor), served in the Stanford Postdoctoral Association leadership, and acted as an ISCB Ambassador, coordinating hackathons, webinar series, and peer-mentoring programs.
STEM outreach: Helped organize Stanford’s Women in Data Science conference and regularly mentors trainees from undergraduates to surgery residents in project design, coding practice, and scientific communication.