Vatsal Mehra

Bioinformatician and Software Developer

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Bioinformatician and a Software Developer with over 10 years of experience specializing in NGS pipelines, web development and data visualization. Skilled at delivering interactive tools for researchers, that provide novel insights in healthcare sector and biomedical sciences. Adept at learning new technologies autodidactically and flexible with different tech stacks. Loves writing, podcasting and teaching rationality. Occassionally, I also work with people directly to help with their personal and professional issues using numerous instrumental rationality techniques and frameworks (see projects section below for an overview of my public work). If you are interested in a coaching/career counselling session, please schedule a spot here.


Work Experience

Co-founder @ Portal

MetaRationality LLP | Sep 2024 - Present

Building a community space that enables epistemic & emotional growth while inspiring impactful work on local & global catastrophic risks.

    Product Manager

    Indx.Ai/OneCell Diagnostics | Nov 2022 - Feb 2024

    Built and managed the development of the iCare platform, enabling oncologists to understand the mutational profiles of their patients and suggest appropriate cancer therapies.

    • Gathered requirements from various stakeholders and translated them into appropriate user interfaces and pipelines.
    • Led a team of software developers and bioinformaticians on various projects within iCare.
    • Designed interactive user interfaces and robust bioinformatics pipelines for flagship products such as OncoDx and OncoPredikt.
    • Oversaw and executed deployment activities, ensuring smooth transitions through all phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

    Data Scientist

    Indx.Ai | Aug 2021 - Nov 2022

    Built a web app from scratch that identifies and annotates rare mutations in cancer patients, providing an interactive interface for oncologists to track patients and discover appropriate treatments.

      Bioinformatician

      Marquette University | Dec 2018 - Jan 2021

      As the solo developer for a lab trying to cure spinal cord injury, I designed and developed multiple bioinformatics piplines and web tools that provide novel insights in genetic and epigenetic regulation behind axon growth.

      • Developed bioinformatics pipelines that discovered novel transcription factor combinations regulating axon growth.
      • Created a web tool that allows scientists to visualize ATAC-Seq, RNA-seq and Histone Chip-Seq datasets across different time points in development of mice.
      • Developed a website that visualizes and quantifies supra spinal neurons with projections to the cervical, thoracic and lumbar segments.

      Programmer Analyst

      Medical College of Wisconsin | April 2018 - July 2018

      Developed a tool for the Rat Genome database that provides a unique way to seamlessly visualize and perform set operations on lists of genes.

        Bioinformatics Support Analyst

        Blood Center of Wisconsin | Oct 2016 - March 2018

        • Developed web-based tools using the Flask framework, that automate and simplify the Bioinformatics workflow of Molecular Diagnostics Lab
        • Human clinical genomics - Monitored NGS workflow, develop variant calling and variant annotation pipelines
        • Designed and created an interactive web tool VIRAS, that provides a graphical view to analyze nucleotide mismatches between patients 10.1016/j.bbmt.2018.12.006
        • Developed data visualization tools using d3.js to help investigators analyze NGS workflow and patient report data

        Consultant Bioinformatician

        Marquette Univeristy | May 2016 - Oct 2016

        Developed custom shell scripts that automate RNA-Seq, and ChIP-Seq workflows

          Research Assistant

          Marqutte University | Aug 2015 - May 2016

          Designed & developed SNPredict, a tool that predicts rare somatic variants using multiple machine learning training algorithms like kNN & LinearSVC

            Software Enginner

            Tech Mahindra, India | Aug 2010 - Nov 2013

            Lead production support duties. Designed, coded and maintained Bash shell scripts to automate tasks for checking and updating status of AT&T servers.

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              Projects

              Interactive visualizations to gain novel insights from time series NGS experiments on murine whole cortex

              3d mouse brain

              Open Source

              3d visualization and quantification of supra spinal neurons with projections to the cervical, thoracic and lumbar segments.

              Teach Me A Bias

              Under Active Development

              A place to learn about different cognitive biases and how to overcome them.

              A podcast that discusses human biases to better understand and improve human thinking/decision making

              A course/club designed for exploring different frameworks and techniques to achieve what we most want, given the physical and mental resources available to us.

              Hyderabad Rationality Meetup

              Meetup

              A bi-weekly meetup that explores the depths of rational thinking with a focus on systematically improving epistemic and instrumental rationality skills. See here for a definition of rationality we like to work with.

              Publications

              Other Academic Interests

              Rationality, Educational Psychology, Effective Altruism, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Science