About Me

I am a computational biologist who likes to pursue science as a career and hobby. I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Broad Institute's Imaging Platform, leading a collaboration of 12 pharma companies and non profit organizations for generating the largest publicly available Cell Painting dataset. To analyze the generated data, I will be developing machine learning based analysis pipelines with the goal of accelerating drug discovery.

I previously worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Massachusetts Medical School developing an algorithm for recognizing DNA copy number variations in targeted sequencing data. I modified and used machine learning and clustering algorithms like t-SNE and fast search in conjunction with Bayesian Inference to identify DNA structural variations in noisy Next Gen Sequencing genomic data.

I graduated with a PhD in Biophysics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My PhD thesis project involved the development of an algorithm, PyPath, which identifies the most probable pathway connecting two stable conformations of biomolecules. I also studied the evolution of aminoacyl t-RNA synthetases and showed that the two classes of these enzymes may have evolved from the opposite strands of the same ancestral gene by proving the Rodin-Ohno Hypothesis.

To broadly state my interest, I am passionate about understanding biological systems using computational, physical and mathematical methods.

When I get the time, I am an amateur astronomer (here are some of the pictures of the night sky that I have clicked over the years). I enjoy reading about the history of science and other popular science books. I am an amateur science blogger too. I hope to nurture scientific interest and kindle scientific curiosity in my readers, by simply explaining interesting theories and phenomena on my blog. In my leisure time I also love watching sports, especially cricket, Formula 1, tennis and basketball. I am a comic book fan and enjoy playing computer games as well, particularly ones related to Star Wars or the dark knight.

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