Sriram Somanchi was a teacher and scholar whose research focused on large-scale data, primarily in health care. His work broke ground by drawing on social science and statistical machine learning.
An associate professor of data analytics in the Mendoza College of Business, Somanchi died suddenly May 31 at age 39.
Friendly and outgoing, Somanchi was the kind of colleague who would introduce new faculty hires to everyone in the department, said Vamsi Kanuri, the Viola D. Hank associate professor of marketing.
That attentive and encouraging spirit extended to students as well. “He took on advising students even as an assistant professor. They looked up to him,” Kanuri said. “He was shaping up to be a great mentor.”
Somanchi joined Notre Dame in 2015 after earning a bachelor’s degree at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, a master’s degree at the Indian Institute of Science and a doctorate in information systems and management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Fascinated by statistical anomalies, Somanchi saw them as clues to guide research. “Each anomaly individually may not be interesting, but when you look at them together as a group, a pattern starts to emerge. And in the patterns, we start to find answers,” he said in an interview last spring for Mendoza Business magazine.
His work was published in top academic journals and earned a number of awards to go alongside the college’s 2023 Plantz award for undergraduate teaching excellence in analytics.
At home he enjoyed tennis, running and other sports, as well as spending time with his family. He is survived by his wife, Rinda Soumya Mangu ’22M.S., ’22MBA, and their two children.