Aarti Venkat
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine
Aarti Venkat’s research interests lie in building infrastructure, reproducible computational workflows, and innovative algorithms for large data ecosystems in the genomics, data science, and machine learning space to ultimately understand the genetic basis of diseases. She is particularly interested in studying fundamental problems in biology and disease with practical impacts on health care. She has recently focused on oncology and developed clinical bioinformatics pipelines with actionable impact. Current projects and interests include development of the biomedical research hub, a centralized data ecosystem for integrating and analyzing several omics datasets for cancer research; the Veterans Affairs National Precision Oncology Initiative; development of bioinformatics and machine learning methods for cancer data, including methods for identifying and validating biomarkers and development of prognostic models, mutation, and copy number variant identification methods; analysis of longitudinal cancer data; and response to therapy.
Her research has been published in Science, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PLOS Biology, Genome Biology, Molecular Ecology, and Proceedings: Biological Sciences.
Venkat received a BA in life science and biochemistry from St. Xavier’s College and a master’s degree in biochemistry from the Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, both in Mumbai, India. She also holds a master’s degree in bioinformatics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in human genetics from the University of Chicago.