Shamkant B. Navathe is a noted researcher in the field of databases with more than 150 publications on different topics in the area of databases. 

He is a professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and founded the Research Group in Database Systems at the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology (popularly called Georgia Tech). He has been at Georgia Tech since 1990. He has been teaching in the database area since 1975 and his textbook Fundamentals of Database Systems (with Ramez Elmasri, published by Pearson, Seventh Edition, 2015) has been a leading textbook in the database area worldwide for the last 19 years. It is now in its seventh edition and is used as a standard textbook in India, Europe, South America, Australia and South-east Asia. The book has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Greek, and in Arabic.

His research is in the area of bioinformatics. Navathe is working in advisory roles with Indian companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Persistent Systems. He is also consultant for companies in information systems and software products design area and is an independent director of GTL Limited, a Mumbai-based telecommunications company.