Prof. Sowdhamini is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. She was an International Senior Fellow of the Wellcome Trust, London and had received the Human Frontier Science Program Award. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences in 2007.She is currently a J C Bose Fellow.

Prof. Sowdhamini’s group use computational biology tools to bridge the gap between sequencing data and biological function prediction. Genome sequencing projects have enormous potential for benefiting human endeavors. However, just as acquiring a language’s vocabulary does not enable one to speak it, databases that list the amino acid composition of proteins do not directly tell us much about these proteins’ higher-level structure and function. The most productive way to indirectly exploit these databases has been to start with the small number of proteins that are fully characterised and to assume that other “similar” proteins will have a related structure and function. Fortunately, this assumption is supported by the strong convergence of millions of proteins adopting a limited and small number of structures. Proteins with very similar amino acid sequence are “no-brainers”, but the real test, which our group largely focuses on, is to detect the “essential” similarity in proteins whose non-critical sections have experienced random rearrangements during evolution. In such cases functionally similar proteins may have less than 25% sequence overlap.

To enable to analyse, ascertain and predict these distant relationships, the group has developed computational algorithms and protocols; most of these are available in the public domain and accessible through https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/mini-research Structural analyses within- and cross-genome surveys of the members of protein families and superfamilies have been pursued. Interests towards drug design have been extended to examine protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions.  The group has contributed to the study of protein-DNA interactions, such as the identification of transcription factor binding sites which are central to plant stress manangement.