His research focuses on ease-of-use and manageability of data-intensive systems, automated problem diagnosis, and cluster sizing for applications running on cloud platforms. Shivnath co-founded Unravel to solve the application management challenges that companies face when they adopt systems like Hadoop and Spark. Unravel originated from the Starfish platform built at Duke which has been downloaded by over 100 companies. Shivnath has received a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, three IBM Faculty Awards, and an HP Labs Innovation Research Award.