She is also director of the interdisciplinary bioinformatics program and an NSF CAREER Award winner. According to a colleague, Loyola is an institution “where undergraduate students do the bulk of the lab work for principal investigators.” In 10 years, Putonti was awarded two university awards for excellence — the Sujack Master Researcher Award and the Sujack Teaching Excellence Award. She is the only faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences of Loyola to recently receive both of these honors.