Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, Denizen of the Cloud

Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy’s head is in the clouds — and that’s a good thing. The assistant director of the Research Computing Group is Saint Louis University’s resident cloud computing expert, and in the brief time she’s been at SLU, Murthy has spearheaded the University’s cloud transformation. Murthy’s work has reshaped how some SLU researchers and centers collect, store and share data.

Her accomplishments were recently celebrated independently as she was named an AWS Champion by Amazon Web Services to mark the ways she’s evolving SLU Research by looking toward the cloud. The distinction is commonly reserved for leaders in higher education who have been working in that space for more than 10 years, according to Murthy.  
 
“I'm pretty amazed that I have been at SLU for five years, and they recognized this,” Murthy said. 
 
Murthy was born in Bangalore, India, and earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bangalore University. She says she decided not to pursue a career in computer science immediately after her undergraduate degree. Instead, she founded an executive search consulting firm before moving to Chennai, India, working on talent management and people strategy for engineering and data science teams as a program manager at Ideas2IT Technologies, a custom software development company. It was at that firm that her interest in technology was rekindled. 
 
“I used to sit with the chief data scientist, when he was talking to customers, understanding requirements and use cases,” Murthy said. “Somehow that fascinated me a lot.” 
 
After more than four years at Ideas2IT, Murthy moved to the U.S. and enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL). There, Murthy built a framework that predicted delays in the arrivals and departures of flights using data from airports across the country. Her work earned her a master’s degree in information systems and technology in 2019. 
 
Murthy came to SLU later that year and worked as a data scientist in the SLU School of Medicine’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology before moving to the University’s Research Computing Group under the Office of the Vice President for Research in late 2020. At OVPR, Murthy works directly with SLU faculty to devise cloud infrastructure strategies for their specific research projects. Starting as lead solutions architect, she became assistant director of the Research Computing Group last year. Murthy said that she still delights in working with faculty members every day. 
  
“I work with researchers on a daily basis,” Murthy said. “I understand their problems, I build solutions for them.” 
 
In her time at Research Computing, Murthy has helped numerous researchers and centers realize the benefits of cloud computing. For example, she revived and modernized SLU’s use of REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture), a web application that builds and manages online surveys and databases. Murthy explained that REDCap has been used at SLU since 2008, but the platform was seldom updated or maintained. So, in 2020, she moved the on-premises REDCap server to the cloud. This makes backup and recovery of the data stored in REDCap much easier and more secure. Murthy said that SLU now counts more than 700 REDCap users and more than 1,800 projects in the cloud-based application. 
 
Among other cloud projects, Murthy has also built a virtual data warehouse for SLU’s Advanced Health Data (AHEAD) Institute. This repository allows SLU and SSM Health researchers to access patient data and AHEAD Institute analysts to assist with analyzing the data to propel research on human disease and therapies.  
 
“All of this happens on the cloud,” Murthy said. “It's encrypted in transit and in rest, and everything is within a secure environment.”  
 
This added layer of security makes the workflow HIPAA compliant, an essential stamp of approval for research on human study participants. 
 
The benefits of storing and sharing research data on the cloud is simple, noted Murthy. “It’s resilient, it’s reliable, it’s scalable,” she said. In addition, there can be significant cost savings to a cloud-computing approach. 
 
Living in St. Louis with her husband Rooban, two daughters — 11-year-old Anshu and 3-year-old Dheera — and her pet snake, Emie, Murthy said she enjoys traveling.  She also noted that she believes in the power of cloud computing for SLU researchers and sees a long future for herself at the University.  
 
“I love my job, and working with some great minds at SLU has been a pleasure,” she said. “It amazes me because every day there is another thing I do that gives me happiness.”