Avantika Lal

Avantika Lal works as a Senior Data Scientist at Insitro (CA, USA), a pharmaceutical startup that was founded by machine learning pioneer Daphne Koller in 2018. The premise behind Insitro’s approach is that many challenges in drug discovery and development could be ameliorated if only we could predict earlier in the process which drugs are likely to work and for which patients. Therefore, Insitro are applying machine learning throughout the pharmaceutical value chain to enable better predictions and bring new medicines to patients who need them. Avantika’s research interests focus on applying AI to genomic data from patients, in order to understand the molecular processes underlying complex human diseases. After completing a PhD in genetics in India, Avantika moved to the USA to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University (CA, USA), where she developed successful machine learning models to predict cancer patients’ response to treatment based on genomic data from their tumors. Later, Avantika became a Senior Scientist at NVIDIA, (CA, USA) where she developed tools based on deep learning and accelerated computing to improve the accuracy of genomic data, enabling more accurate biomedical analyses.