I was born and raised in Dhaka, the capital city and heart of urban life in Bangladesh. From an early age, I had a deep fascination for math and anything that could be deduced by finding patterns. Throughout my years in middle and high school, as I delved more into application-based paths, my interests matured and began to span physics, coding, human languages, and eventually chemistry and biology as well! My love for scientific research comes from the YouTube channels I follow most: 3Blue1Brown, a math channel where host Grant Sanderson makes elegant connections between seemingly disparate concepts, and Game Maker’s Toolkit, hosted by Mark Brown, who highlights mechanics in video games that are simple to pick up, yet versatile enough to be used in a variety of situations.

The challenges that interest me the most are not problems that can be solved in more than one way, but those which require several different approaches. One of my favorite quotes is by Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto, “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once,” a principle that we can see when we examine games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Splatoon. This motto inspires me deeply, and I try to apply it in as many facets of my research as I can. In my undergraduate research at Dr. Sung Joon Kim’s Biophysics Lab at Howard, as well as my summer internships, I used signal processing and data visualization techniques to make sense of the wet lab assays I conduct. Presently, as part of the Chubykin Lab at Purdue, my interests are in investigating how visual learning and memory are encoded in the neuronal circuitry of mice and elucidating the relationship between the two using computational methods.