Sankar is a Regents Professor and Sikorsky Professor at the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As director of the School's Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab, he leads a research and education program focused on modeling and simulating unsteady viscous flow around aircraft, helicopters, horizontal-axis wind turbines, and turbomachinery components. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in aerodynamics, helicopter theory, wind energy, aerodynamic design, and computational aerodynamics.

Sankar is the author or co-author of more than 300 technical publications in the fields of spatially and temporally high-order algorithms, 3-D unsteady transonic flow over aircraft configurations, helicopter aeromechanics, compressor stall and surge, wind energy, and aerodynamic design. He is an AIAA Fellow, a Technical Fellow of the American Helicopter Society, and a member of the American Society of Engineering Educators and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.