Ganapathy Shanmugam is a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his bachelor degree from Annamalai University in 1965, master degree from Department of Civil Engineering, IIT-Bombay, India in 1968, and PhD from University of Tennessee in 1978.

Prof. Ganapathy Shanmugam conducted outcrop studies of deep-water deposits in the Southern Appalachians (Tennessee, United States), Ouachita Mountains (Arkansas and Oklahoma, United States), and Peira Cava area (French Maritime Alps, SE France). He described deep-water strata using conventional cores and outcrops (1:20 to 1:50 scale), which include 32 deepwater sandstone petroleum reservoirs worldwide, totaling over 10,000 m in cumulative thickness during 1974–2011. He also conducted field studies of coal deposits in Victoria (Australia), coniferous rain forests in the North Island (New Zealand), limestone karst in Guilin (China), fluvial deposits in Gujarat (India), 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami-related coastal deposits in Tamil Nadu (India), shallow-marine deposits in Qassim area (Saudi Arabia), and estuarine deposits in the Oriente Basin (Ecuador).