Ratna Kandala

Hello! I am Dr. Ratna. Welcome! I am a computational biologist by background. I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the EMIC Lab in the Department of Psychology, University of Kansas under Dr. Katie Hoemann. I am working on applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to multilingual and multimodal datasets to understand how the language people use in daily life relates to emotions, behaviors, relationships, and well-being.

Previously, I was a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH). I worked with Dr. Prakash Mondal in the Language and Cognition Group. Before IITH, I obtained my masters in English Language Studies from the School of Humanities and Integrated Masters in Systems Biology from the School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), where I worked with Dr. Joby Joseph, Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences (CNCS) on understanding the algorithms and computational principles underlying the perception & behavior of the neural network(s) responsible for olfaction in insects.