I have many institute emails, they change as I move from one institute to another. The constant email id is hiraksarkar.cs@gmail.com

Hi I am Hirak, a Ludwig Princeton Scholar at the Princeton University. I work in the field of cancer-genomics under the guidance of Prof. Yibin Kang and Prof. Ben Raphael. I am very fortunate to work with Prof. Eileen White’s lab at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard with Prof. Peter Kharchenko (till mid-2022) . I completed my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland under the guidance of Prof. Rob Patro. I primarily work on two broad areas of computational biology. On one hand, I design ultra fast mapping algorithms and compression schemes for raw sequencing data. On the other hand, I also work on the application of machine learning algorithms to analyze heterogeneous, large-scale public datasets.

Academic Background

Before my research assistantship at UMD, I completed a Masters (M.S.) in Computer Science at Stony Brook University and a Masters of Technology (M.Tech) at Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (more focused towards theoretical computer science). At the Indian Statistical Institute, I defended my masters thesis in graph theory (which gained erdos number of 3, which is closest I could have gotten to). For a brief stint, I was a researcher at the CS department at National University of Singapore and a junior research fellow at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.