Speaker: Vijay Chandru, ARTPark, IISc Bangalore
Abstract: The presentation will cover several threads of ongoing work on data-driven surveillance and decision support to health agencies on climate and one-health-related challenges. We will also briefly discuss genomic health risks revealed by whole exome sequencing of healthy cohorts from India.
Bio: Vijay Chandru is an Adjunct Professor in BioSystems Science and Engineering and Executive Advisor to the AI & Robotics Tech Park, both at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India. His academic research career in decision sciences spanned over four decades at MIT, Purdue University, and the IISc. His training in electrical engineering at BITS (Pilani) and operational research at UCLA and MIT led him to explore academic research in computational mathematics of geometry, logic, machine learning, biology, and heritage art. A recipient of the President’s Medal of INFORMS, Vijay is a fellow of the Indian Academies of Science (IASc) and Engineering (INAE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In technology innovation, he has been an inventor of the Simputer®, India’s early and heralded solution in handheld computing that was developed at IISc to address the digital divide in the late 1990s. He also went on to work in computational biology towards addressing genetic disorders in South Asian populations at Strand Life Sciences, India’s first precision medicine solutions company, which he co-founded and led as executive chairman from 2000-2018. His work since 2018 has been with foundations that are dedicated to health policy, open data for the public good, and healthcare access for underserved communities. He serves as a commissioner with the Lancet Citizen's Commission for reimagining India's health systems.