Suraj Rajendran

Computational Biology PhD Student @ Weill Cornell Medicine

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New York City, NY

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, and 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.

Experience & Education

  • Bioinformatics Researcher, Wake Forest School of Medicine (under Dr. Umit Topaloglu). Projects: irAE identification, COVID-19 diagnosis prediction, and federated learning.
  • B.S. Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Minor in Computing and Intelligence. President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) Fellow.

Outreach

I am passionate about mentorship and equity in academia:

  • IMentor (since 2023): Mentoring underprivileged high school students in NYC through the college application process.
  • Lumiere Education: Research Mentor for students exploring machine learning in healthcare.
  • Equity & Access: Led a team at Georgia Tech that proposed policy changes for academic recognition for students with disabilities.
  • Public Health: Led a winning proposal for the HHS “Giving=Living” campaign to promote blood donations.

GRFP Help

The NSF GRFP has been transformative for my career. I am happy to discuss the application process or share my research and personal statements with prospective applicants.

news

Jul 11, 2025 A project I’m very proud of, where we developed a foundation model for IVF, is out in Nature Communications! Check it out here.
Jul 01, 2025 Our paper exploring the integration of federated learning with trial emulation was published in npj Digital Medicine! Check it out here.
May 13, 2025 We explored the effect of steroids and subphenotypes of sepsis. Our results were published in Nature Communications! Check it out here.
Apr 20, 2025 Our paper TrialGenie on automating clinical trial design and emulation with agents was just put on medRxiv! Check it out here.
Dec 12, 2024 NVIDIA wrote an article on our recent Nature Communications paper on BELA!

selected publications

  1. A foundational model for in vitro fertilization trained on 18 million time-lapse images
    S. Rajendran, E. Rehani, W. Phu, and 1 more author
    Nature Communications, 2025
  2. Federated learning for clinical trial emulation: a case study in sepsis
    S. Rajendran and others
    npj Digital Medicine, 2025
  3. Steroids and subphenotypes of sepsis: a multicentre cohort study
    S. Rajendran and others
    Nature Communications, 2025