Hi - I’m Vivek and I’m currently a fifth-year PhD candidate in Computational Biology at Brown University. I work in the Center of Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) and the Brown Center of Biomedical Informatics (BCBI), with an expected graduation in Spring 2025.

I’m advised by Indra Neil Sarkar and, from a birds-eye view, work on the interesection between health, biological molecular data, and computer science techniques. I’m particularly interested in microbiomes and microbes, from health to agriculture, and many other health-adjacent topics, like cancer, allergies, immunology, epidemiology, and genetic data privacy. Before my PhD, I worked as a Clinical Bioinformatics Analyst at Foundation Medicine, where I curated genomic samples of solid tumor data and worked on multiple research projects using the cancer genomics data and novel methods.

Aside from my research work, I also served as the 2022-2023 Industry Lead at the MIT Microbiome Club (co-lead from 2021-2022), where I helped run a industry mentorship program for undergraduates and graduate students in the microbiome field (Spring 2022) and an industry seminar series (Fall 2022).

Completely outside of my academic and industry work, I’m also a musician and dancer in the Indian performing arts and have been performing, composing, and producing artistic work.

News

• [Spring 2025] Expected graduation from PhD
• [May. 2024] Masters in Computational Biology from Brown University
• [Jun. 2023] Poster Presentation at ISMB 2023
• [Aug. 2022] Awarded NIH T32 in Biological Data Science
• [July. 2022] Paper accepted in Bioinformatics!
• [Jan. 2022] Presented a talk at the Rhode Island Microbiome Symposium.

Some of the topics I work on

Microbiome I’ve been interested in the microbiome since my undergraduate education. Currently, some of my interests are: how microbiomes develop in infant guts, perturbations that impact composition and diversity, how diets across different groups of humans / animal groups affect composition, microbial metabolism and gut epithelia, horizontal transfer within microbiomes, and long-term evolution of microbiomes across human lifespans.

Genomics and Phylogenetics As the foundation of much of computational biology, I’m fascinated by how genomes play roles in health and disease, yet are not always the sole contributing factor to disease. Some of my interests here are focused on horizontal transfer and gene order and distribution in bacterial genomes, as well as phylogenetics of microbial genes related to a character-based classification approach, created by my advisor.

Cancer Cancer is undoubtedly one of the most important fields of research around - my interests in it lie (unsurprisingly) with the indirect and direct effects of microbiomes. Whether its tumor microenvironments containing bacteria and fungi or microbes migrating to sites of cancer (e.g. liver cancer) or chemotherapy potentially acting as a selection pressure for antibiotic resistance, I’m fascinated by it.

Electronic Health Records and Epidemiology EHRs are a huge source of public health data, which have been particularly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using EHRs to analyze health trends is a valuable way of making use of clinical data that is largely untouched. It’s also a great area for the development natural language processing tools and learning about the clinical and social practices that define how this data is formed.