I am working as a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina. Currently, intriguing questions on structural variants in human genome are what mostly keep my reserach-brain occupied: more precise identification, more ‘sensible’ way of representing and comparing them etc.
In sync with my Stringology background, I try to catch up with new research related to kmers, seeding-chaining, alignments, polishing, indexing, assembling and the likes. Many thanks to Academic Twitter!
Being a mother to two young ones is the other hat I lovingly wear. My family and my work are what propel me to keep improving and striving to do my best.
Skills
My routine work and hobby projects involve data analysis (scripting/plotting with Python/Pandas/Numpy, Bash, etc.), method development (C++ when it comes to implementation, learning RUST too), putting together pipelines (Nextflow, Snakemake etc.). Combination of git, JIRA, and Confluence is the usual glue that I am accustomed to, for keeping everything structured.
PostDoc
I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the National University of Singapore (School of Computing) with Prof. Wing-Kin Sung as my mentor. I was involved in a couple of projects on genomic analysis of Singaporean populace and development of long reads/hybrid assembler.
PhD
I recently completed my PhD from King’s College London (Department of Informatics) and have been a winner of the 2019 King’s Outstanding PhD Thesis Prizes (sponsored by Elsevier)[link].
Title: Algorithmic Advances in Handling Uncertainty and Regularity in Strings [Thesis] [Slides]
Mentors: Dr. Toktam Mahmoodi and Dr. Solon Pissis
Timeline: Started in October 2015; thesis-submission in July 2018; defence in January 2019.
Examiners: Prof. Thomas Erlebach (University of Leicester) and Prof Leszek Gąsieniec (University of Liverpool)
Research Interests
- Algorithms in Bioinformatics; specifically, for assembly, alignment, and analysis of the third generation sequencing data
- Algorithms and Data structures on sequences for pattern matching, indexing, text-compression etc.
- Algorithmic Engineering
Other Interests
Well, I have two toddlers now. Not have enough bandwidth for other interests but still try to go back to these whenever I can.
- Programming: I love programming! “Correct” (read efficient) implementation of an algorithm is as important as the algorithm itself. These days, I have a few classical algorithms by Prof. Maxime Crochemore on my to-implement list. Apart from software-tools, I indulge from time to time in programming robotic kits.
- Teaching: In my opinion, nothing clarifies your own concepts and foundations better than trying to explain those to some non-expert enthusiasts on the subject. Whenever possible, I try to get involved in academic teaching. I already have started publishing online tutorials on String algorithms.
- Health and Nutrition: Over the years, I have realised how wrong the conventional and textbook knowledge on what is and what is not healthy for us. I keep reading blogs and research articles to update my knowledge-base on healthy living. Two of my favourite sources are blogs/articles/podcasts of Dr. Ray Peat and P. D. Mangan.
- Indic culture and history: I am trying to learn Sanskrit (at a snail-speed though!) so as to be able to read ancient indic texts and scriptures. Currently, I am trying to understand fundamentals of Ayurveda and Yoga (from the books by Dr. David Frawley).