T. M. Murali is a professor and associate department head for research in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He directs the NSF COMPASS Center and the Virginia Tech Destination Area on Pandemic Prediction and Prevention. He is the associate director for the Computational Tissue Engineering interdisciplinary graduate education program. Murali's research group develops phenomenological and predictive models dealing with the function, behavior, and properties of large-scale molecular interaction networks in the cell. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and his Sc. M. and Ph. D. degrees from Brown University. Murali received the College of Engineering (COE) New Assistant Professor Award in 2005, the Outstanding Dissertation Advisor Award from Virginia Tech in 2008, a COE Faculty Fellowship from 2012 to 2015, and the COE Excellence in Research Award in 2016. He is a Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).