Shivashankar is currently a Full Professor of Mechano-​Genomics at the Department of Health Science and Technology, ETH Zurich and he also heads the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology at the Paul Scherrer Institute. He is the Scientific co-founder of Focal Biosciences. His research interests include Nuclear mechanics, 3D chromosome organization, genome regulation, disease diagnostics.

His research focuses on understanding the coupling between cell mechanics and genome organization for the regulation of cell homeostasis and cell state transitions. In addition, his group also developed imaging-AI based chromatin biomarkers as fingerprints for cells in health and disease. Towards this, his group employs multi-scale correlative bio-imaging methods combined with bioengineered interfaces, functional genomics, theoretical modeling, and machine learning.

He carried out his PhD at the Rockefeller University and Postdoctoral research at NEC Research Institute. He was a tenured faculty at the National Center for Biological Sciences, NCBS-​TIFR- Bangalore, India before relocating to the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2010. He was the Deputy Director of the Mechanobiology Institute at NUS (2011-​2019) and was the IFOM-​NUS Chair Professor (2014-​2019) before joining ETH.