Sameer completed his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in Bioengineering in 2002 under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Lieber, for his research on biomechanical roles of skeletal muscle intermediate filaments. Sameer stayed on at UCSD for his post-doctoral training with Dr. Larry Goldstein, in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, researching mechanisms of neuronal degeneration and modeling axonal transport.