Suraj Rajendran

Suraj Rajendran

PhD Student in Computational Biology

Suraj Rajendran

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in the Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Computational Biology at Weill Cornell Medical College, specializing in computational biology and machine learning. My research interests include exploring multimodal methods for furthering women’s health and in vitro fertilization (IVF), clinical trial emulation, natural language processing and modeling in medical data, as well as deep learning in genomics. I am honored to be supported by the National Science Foundation through a Graduate Research Fellowship. Currently, I am co-mentored by Dr. Fei Wang and Dr. Iman Hajirasouliha.

In the past, I have had the opportunity to work as a Bioinformatics Researcher at Wake Forest School of Medicine under the guidance of Dr. Umit Topaloglu. My projects there included the identification of immunotherapy-related adverse events (irAEs), predicting COVID-19 diagnosis using televisits and progress notes, and federated learning using cloud computing.

During my undergraduate studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, I majored in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Computing and Intelligence. I was awarded the President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) Fellowship.

Outreach

I have been actively involved in various outreach activities. Since March 2023, I have been a Research Mentor at Lumiere Education in New York City, where I have mentored students on machine learning in healthcare. I have also led a team for the Dept. of Health & Humans Services Blood Donation Campaign from October 2022 to February 2023, where we developed a winning proposal for the “Giving=Living” campaign aimed at promoting blood donations to address shortages. I have also led a team addressing inequities in academic recognition for disadvantaged groups from December 2021 to April 2022. We proposed a policy to ensure that students with disabilities get academic recognition for completed courses at Georgia Tech, and presented our findings to the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Diversity & Inclusion Council.

GRFP Help

The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has opened numerous doors for me, and I strongly urge all eligible individuals to consider applying. I’m more than willing to discuss the application process and provide insights based on my experience. If you’re interested, I can also share my research and personal statement upon request.

News

  • 10/21/2024: We got a lot of publicity for our recent Nature Communications paper on BELA! Check out the press release. We also got the opportunity to present our work at the 2024 American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) conference as well as the 2024 Cornell Intercampus Symposium for Maternal Health.
  • 9/05/2024: Our paper on BELA, a video classification model for IVF, was published in Nature Communications! Check it out here.
  • 8/02/2024: I finished my internship at Regeneron! Visit the post I made about it here.
  • 7/14/2024: I gave a talk at the 2024 European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference about our current research of developing foundational AI models for predicting embryo ploidy status using time-lapse images. Read the abstract here.
  • 5/29/2024: The research I worked on in my undergraduate lab just got published in Nature Communications! Check it out here.
  • 5/15/2024: I started an internship at Regeneron as a Data Science Intern in the Process Sciences department. I will be working on developing pipelines using Large Language Models and computer vision.
  • 1/24/2024: We published a review paper on Cross-Cohort Cross-Category Learning (C4) and its importance in the future of healthcare AI. Read it at Cell Patterns here.
  • 12/11/2023: Our team developed a curriculum for learning genomics for middle and high school students that the NIH plans on implementing at select schools across the United states, see here for details.
  • 11/2/2023: Check out the podcast episode where I talked about my research with Dr. Carina Minardi on STEM From.
  • 10/25/2023: I gave a talk at Instituto de Salud Carlos III in Dr. Biagio Mandracchia’s Introduction to Biomedical AI course. I talked about the burgeoning field of Cross-Cohort Cross-Category Learning (C4) and its applications in healthcare.
  • 9/19/2023: Our team placed 3rd in NASA’s Pushback to the Future Challenge! See the blog post written about the winners and our approach here.