The Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance (Alliance) is pleased to announce Ananthan Nambiar as the newest recipient of the Fellowship for Technology-Based Healthcare. The fellowship provides two years of support for graduate students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to work collaboratively with Mayo Clinic researchers and clinicians on a translational research project to develop new technologies and clinical tools aimed at advancing individualized medicine.
Ananthan Nambiar is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois, working on machine learning for computational biology. He is experienced with deep learning and language models for biological sequences (both protein and DNA), machine learning for microbiome data, and graph neural networks. Nambiar’s expertise in these areas will allow him to make significant contributions to the Tapestry DNA Sequencing Research Study, which collects and stores genomic data as a part of electronic health records for research participants at Mayo Clinic.
The Project
Nambiar’s research project will focus on developing a deep learning algorithm to predict the occurrence and risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in patients and investigate how the impact of dietary interventions on NAFLD patients can be evaluated using whole exome sequencing data. Nambiar’s research will be supervised by both Illinois and Mayo Clinic advisors from May 2024 through May 2026.
At Illinois, Nambiar will work with advisors Sergei Maslov, Professor of Bioengineering and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Modeling, and Sharon Donovan, Professor of Nutritional Sciences and Director of the Personalized Nutrition Initiative.
At Mayo Clinic, Nambiar will work with advisors Konstantinos Lazaridis, Professor of Medicine and Executive Director of the Center for Individualized Medicine, and Arjun Athreya, Principal Data Scientist and Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Psychology. Athreya is an Illinois Electrical & Computer Engineering alum and one of the first recipients of this fellowship.
As a Fellow for Technology-Based Healthcare, Nambiar will receive a $40,000 stipend and coverage of tuition and select fees, spending one year on-site at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and one year at Illinois.
Potential outcomes
Nambiar’s research project aims to equip healthcare providers with a valuable tool for early diagnosis and risk assessment of NAFLD. The ability to predict the effects of dietary interventions on NAFLD patients would allow clinicians to tailor interventions and treatments to individual patients.
“This project exemplifies the synergy between the fields of computational biology, nutrition, and clinical medicine,” Nambiar said. “Such a collaboration is essential to the success of this endeavor, ensuring that the developed algorithms are not only scientifically robust, but also clinically applicable.”
Fellowship opportunities
The Fellowship for Technology-Based Healthcare is focused on high performance computing, big data, software development, imaging, nanotechnology, point-of-care diagnostics, bioinformatics, systems biology, genomics, and tissue engineering, while creating a pathway for Illinois students to investigate post-graduation employment opportunities at Mayo Clinic. Including Nambiar, the Alliance has supported 14 Illinois graduate students since 2016.
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