Speaker
Rahul Singh
Abstract
Finding cures for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) is one of the most complex and crucial endeavors in modern science. This class of diseases encompasses a number of infection categories including helminth infections, protozoan infections, bacterial infections, and viral infections. Cumulatively, these diseases impact a significant fraction of the world’s population and various studies have indicated NTDs to be the prime factors depriving the affected people of their health and economic potential.
In this talk I will describe how AI-algorithms and bioimage data analysis can be applied to model and analyze complex high-dimensional data obtained from chemical-biology and drug screening experiments. The talk will focus on the etiological agent of one of the most significant tropical diseases called schistosomiasis and show how the AI-based computational approach has led us, among others, to the solution of a historically long-standing problem that had bottlenecked quantitative and high-throughput chemical biology/drug discovery in this disease area.
Bio
Rahul Singh is a professor in the department of computer science at San Francisco State University and a professor (by affiliation) at the Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, UC-San Diego. His interests lie in employing computer science to open new ways to study and find cures for diseases. Also, he is especially invested in developing a new generation of scientists who can work at the interface of computer science, biomedicine, and health.
Prof. Singh received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and his Diplom from the Moscow Power Institute. Prior to joining academia, he was a principle scientist at Scimagix. Earlier he founded and headed the computational drug discovery group at Exelixis. At Scimagix, Dr. Singh’s work led to the development of ProteinMine© - a commercial system for proteomics data storage, mining and analysis, which received the Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. His work at Exelixis has in-part, led to two marketed Oncology drugs: Cabozantinib (sold under the brand-names Cabometyx® and Cometriq®) and Cobimetinib (sold under the brand name Cotellic®). Professor Singh is a recipient of the CAREER award of the National Science Foundation. His research has been supported, among others, by the NIH, the NSF, and a number of philanthropic foundations.