Giriram Kumar Mohana Sundara Shanmugam obtained his Master degree in molecular biology from University of Madras (India) in 2010. Between 2010 and 2013, he worked as Junior research fellow in the lab of Prof. Usha Vijayaraghvan at the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore). There, he worked on RNAi and splicing regulating in S.pombe.

Later, he joined the lab of Jean-Yves Roignant as a research assistant at the Institute of Molecular Biology (Mainz, Germany) and studied the function of 7SK small nuclear RNA protein complex in fruit flies did a PhD in the same lab. He graduated in September 2019 and has joined the Gambetta lab in October 2019.