I am currently a bioinformatics scientist at the Health Data Science Unit, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Germany. I did my doctoral studies from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and Hans Knöll Institute (HKI). After my PhD, I briefly worked as a scientific associate at The Center for Sepsis Control & Care, Universitätsklinikum Jena. I have a Masters degree in Genomics from the Madurai Kamraj University, India and a Bachelors degree in Biotechnology from Vellore Institute of Technology, India.

I have ~8 years (4 years each of PhD and PostDoc) of experience as a computational biologist. Most of my research questions have involved integrating different layers of -omics data for the mechanistic understanding of tumour processes, biomarker discovery, patient stratification and hypothesis validation. Although, my domain knowledge is mainly in the field of oncology, I have a generalist knowledge in other biomedical research areas too and I feel that many of the computational techniques and skills that I have acquired and learned in the field of tumour biology is transferable to other tissue/disease portfolios.

Technical Skills

• Domain knowledge of tumor biology, molecular biology, metabolism, biochemistry and (epi-)genomics
• Multi -omic data analysis – RNAseq, Microarray, 450/850K methylation array, CHIPseq, ATACseq etc
• Experience in analysing high throughput screening datasets
• Experience with single-cell technologies, especially scRNA-seq
• Machine Learning with focus on classification, regression and feature selection problems
• Experience in handling data from TCGA, GTeX, ENCODE, DepMap, Human cell atlas etc
• Scoring of molecular phenotypes using established gene signatures
• Identification of molecular signatures in disease cohorts and associating it to clinical outcomes
• Running and maintaining established NGS pipelines
• Biological pathway analysis, Biomarker discovery, Pattern recognition, Data visualisation etc
• Data interpretation, quality control, result documentation and effective communication
• R statistical programming, Bioconductor, Bash, Github, Snakemake, Rmarkdown, Shiny, Docker
• Some experience in cloud computing - OpenStack

Interpersonal Skills

Most of my projects were carried out in close collaboration with experimental or clinical groups. Thus, I have the necessary experience in managing and working in multidisciplinary teams. Furthermore, my academic background was in experimental biology while my professional background is in computational biology which has made me a good intermediary who can bridge and communicate across diverse experts in interdisciplinary projects.