Varun Narendra, M.S.

M.D./Ph.D. Student, NYU School of Medicine

I graduated from Harvard University with a bachelors in Mathematics, and got my Master's in Mathematics from NYU. I am currently a 1st year medical student in the MD/PhD program at the NYU School of Medicine. My research interests lie in the clever and useful application of mathematics to medically relevant research problems. More specifically, I am interested in the application of statistical learning algorithms to genomics and proteomics research, as well as in the mathematical modeling and simulation of biological processes.

Currently I am working with Dr. Alexander Statnikov on the subject of reverse engineering genetic regulatory networks from high-throughput microarray data. Often it is experimentally very difficult to determine how genes are regulated in cells, while knowledge of regulatory control can lead to the development of treatments for a vast array of diseases. Our goal is to learn how gene expression is regulated by applying clever statistical algorithms to high-dimensional microarray data. Though many such algorithms exist, they currently fall short of the task at hand. Furthermore, methods for evaluating them are currently poor. Thus, we are working on the three-fold problem of developing algorithms to reconstruct regulatory networks, collaborating with biologists to determine "gold-standard"
networks of functionally proven regulatory interactions, and evaluating network reconstruction algorithms by comparing them against these gold-standards.

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