Sahil Patel

Pronouns: he/him

Current Research Project: My research interests involve the application of math and computer science to solve problems in biology and medicine. Through the Human Affect and Pain Neuroscience (HAPN) Lab, I am working on a project which involves analyzing fMRI spinal cord data to study differences in spinal cord activity between patients with fibromyalgia and healthy controls. As this research comes to a conclusion, I am about to start a new project which entails using big data techniques to analyze large-scale brain imaging data of fibromyalgia patients. Additionally, under Dr. NaderiAlizadeh, I am performing bioinformatics research that involves applying deep learning to create representations of proteins based on their cell contexts. These contextualized protein representations can be used for numerous downstream tasks, such as predicting whether a protein interacts with a particular drug in a specific cell.

How he got involved with research: I got started with the HAPN Lab in the spring of my freshman year through cold-emailing various professors whose research interested me. I explored numerous labs and talked to many professors before deciding on the HAPN Lab. I became involved with the Naderi Lab in the fall of my sophomore year by applying through MUSER.