Rate My Professor Sneha Goenka

Goenka's research centers on computer systems architecture and computational genomics, developing specialized hardware and software to accelerate large-scale genomic data analysis for clinical diagnostics and research applications. Her contributions include leading the computational development for the world's fastest whole-genome diagnosis technique, achieving genetic diagnosis within eight hours using nanopore sequencing and identifying pathogenic variants in 42% of critical care patients. She created SegAlign, a scalable GPU-based whole-genome aligner offering up to 14x speedup and 2.3x cost reduction, and Darwin-WGA, a co-processor that boosts whole-genome alignment performance per dollar by up to 24x and sensitivity. Key publications are 'Accelerated identification of disease-causing variants with ultra-rapid nanopore genome sequencing' (Nature Biotechnology, 2022), 'Ultrarapid nanopore genome sequencing in a critical care setting' (New England Journal of Medicine, 2022), 'SegAlign: A scalable GPU-based whole genome aligner' (SC, 2020), and 'Darwin-WGA: A co-processor provides increased sensitivity in whole genome alignments with high speedup' (HPCA, 2019). Her honors include MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year (2025), Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science (2023), NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship (2022), ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher (2024), Stanford Centennial TA Award (2024), and Cadence Women in Technology Scholar (2021).