Guest Speaker: Rahul Singh

Computational Phenotypic Screening and its Application for Drug Discovery Against Neglected Diseases

Drug discovery constitutes one of the most complex endeavors in modern science. Of the many challenges facing drug discovery, neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) constitute an especially difficult one. Societally, and economically NTDs constitute the most common infections of the world’s poorest people. 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 majority of the world’s population and various studies have indicated NTDs to be the prime factors depriving the affected populations of their health and economic potential.

This talk will focus on the emerging technology of computational phenotypic screening and how it can be applied for early-stage drug screening for NTDs. Specifically, I will talk about how techniques from computational imaging, time-series analysis, and machine learning can be interfaced with parasitology, high-throughput biology, and chemistry to design new methodologies for drug discovery against one of the most significant tropical diseases called schistosomiasis.

Rahul Singh is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University and Professor by affiliation, at the Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, University of California, San Francisco. His technical interests are in computational drug discovery, bioinformatics, and multimedia information modeling and management. The primary thrust of Dr. Singh’s research activities lies in developing algorithmic techniques and computational infrastructure that are especially of value in curing the neglected diseases of humankind.

Dr. Singh received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and the diplom, from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Singh was principal staff scientist (Imaging) at Scimagix Inc, where he was the co-designer of the ProteinMineTM software which received the Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Earlier he founded and headed the computational drug discovery department at Exelixis Inc. Dr. Singh was a San Francisco State University Presidential Fellow and is a recipient of the CAREER award of the National Science Foundation.

Host: Raghu Machiraju