Vatsal Mehra
- mehra.vatsal@gmail.com
- www.vatsalmehra.com
- Hyderabad, India
Over a decade in bioinformatics and software development, leading teams and building tools for biomedical research. Recently, I’ve shifted focus to teaching rationality - designing and facilitating workshops that help people think clearer, make better decisions, and recognize cognitive biases. I also co-founded Portal, a community space for epistemic and personal growth. Interested in work that combines technical problem-solving with understanding of human behavior.
Work Experience
Facilitating two Futurekind Fellowship cohorts and, as part of the Builder Track, helping build AI tools for animal welfare.
https://www.electricsheep.is/futurekind
Running 12 hands-on workshops in Bangalore & Hyderabad to help people think clearer, make better decisions, and catch their biases.
https://rationalityworkshops.com
Built and lead a coaching practice that helps clients make better decisions and build resilience by blending practical problem-solving with emotional awareness.
https://rationalresilience.org
Building a community space that enables epistemic & emotional growth while inspiring impactful work on local & global catastrophic risks.
Product Manager
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
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
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
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
- 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
Developed custom shell scripts that automate RNA-Seq, and ChIP-Seq workflows
Research Assistant
Designed & developed SNPredict, a tool that predicts rare somatic variants using multiple machine learning training algorithms like kNN & LinearSVC
Software Enginner
Lead production support duties. Designed, coded and maintained Bash shell scripts to automate tasks for checking and updating status of AT&T servers.
Projects
Interactive visualizations to gain novel insights from time series NGS experiments on murine whole cortex
3d visualization and quantification of supra spinal neurons with projections to the cervical, thoracic and lumbar segments.
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
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
- 2022 · Brain-wide analysis of the supraspinal connectome reveals anatomical correlates to functional recovery after spinal injury eLife
- 2021 · Co-occupancy identifies transcription factor co-operation for axon growth Nature Communications
- 2018 · Developmental chromatin restriction of pro-growth gene networks acts as an epigenetic barrier to axon regeneration in cortical neurons Developmental Neurobiology
- 2018 · KLF6 and STAT3 co-occupy regulatory DNA and functionally synergize to promote axon growth in CNS neurons Scientific Reports
- 2018 · Direct HLA Genetic Comparisons Identify Highly Matched Unrelated Donor-Recipient Pairs with Improved Transplantation Outcome Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation
Other Academic Interests
Rationality, Educational Psychology, Effective Altruism, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Science