Sriram Shamasunder graduated from University of California, Berkeley and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. He obtained his Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene in 2013. Throughout the last decade he has spent several months out of every year in underserved settings around the world including South Los Angeles, rural Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and rural India.

Sri is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 9 countries around the world. HEAL currently has over 200 fellows, over the last nine years, half of whom are Native American and from low and middle income countries(LMIC).

He was awarded the Young Physician of the Year in 2010, by the Northern California Chapter of the American College of Physicians and was named an Asia21 fellow by the Asia Foundation in 2012, a Fulbright-Nehru scholar to India in 2012 and a Draper Richards Kaplan entrepreneur in 2016. He was an Emerson Dial Fellow in 2021, and received the UCSF Chancellor's Edison T. Uno Award for Public Service in 2023.

Dr. Shamasunder led the HEAL UCSF response during the ongong COVID surge in Navajo Nation spending several weeks with HEAL's partner site hospital taking care of COVID patients and supporting UCSF nursing and doctor volunteers. Over 40 nurses and doctors In April, May and June 2020 from UCSF joined the over 50 HEAL fellows(Native and non-Native) in Navajo Nation. Navajo Area Indian Health Service Awarded HEAL Volunteer of the Year for 2020 for this effort.

Sri is a published poet and studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People while at UC Berkeley. He is interested in a solidarity that draws untold stories to the surface as well as health equity. In 2016, he gave a Berkeley Ted X talk entitled "Whose Suffering Matters Less, and Why"?