I am Lekshmi Dharmarajan, a modeller in Novartis, based in Basel. I recently defended my PhD in October 2020. Currently I started a new job, and I try to help the next PhD student who will be moving my work forward. I like trying out different things especially in the realm of ODE based modelling, modeling longitudinal data and general statistical inference which I am documenting here. I also like reading works of fiction that resemble reality, historical accounts and learning about philosophy. I am getting my head a bit into epidemiology and statistical modeling of clinical trial data as this is new to me and we are living at a time when we can see how such models can impact our life. I would share my notes about these in the Blog Posts section. My long term goal of working in quantitative sciences in the arena of global health and neglected diseases with a focus on developing and delivering drugs.

History

I was born in beautiful Kerala in India and did my schooling and bachelor degree in engineering in Tamil Nadu. I moved to Switzerland for my Masters looking for an adventure. Here, I encountered computational biology and was instantly hooked to it. I developed an odd obsession with ‘time’ and ‘dynamics’ and my love for longitudinal data analysis began. During the course of my PhD, I have designed and executed computational projects and also ventured into the wet-lab to generate my own microscopy images using budding yeast. I implemented a computational pipeline to infer nonlinear mixed effect models (NLMEs) of signaling networks from time-lapse imaging data. Using the model we inferred with the pipeline, we identified which processes in endocytosis contribute most to the observed heterogeneity in a population of single-cells. My pet project involves modeling the impact of mutations found in cancer on MAPK signaling dynamics. My main expertise lies in longitudinal data analysis, modeling biological data with mechanistic models, nonlinear optimization and uncertainty quantification. In addition, I have framed exercises and organized tutorials for a semester course on Experimental Design for master students of Biotechnology at ETH.