Nikhita Damaraju (center) and Drs. Danny Miller (left) and Brian Shirts: 'I was curious about how people were using genetics for public health – there is a lot of opportunity in this field.'
*“The world cannot be understood without numbers, but the world cannot be understood with numbers alone” *
Hans Rosling, Swedish physician, professor and author of Factfulness
One might say that Nikhita Damaraju works in the family business.
Her parents, older sister, and members of her extended family all work in either engineering, biology, or technology in India and the United States.
“I had a lot of early exposure to science and computer programming,” said Damaraju, a Ph.D. student in the lab of BBI’s Danny Miller, M.D., Ph.D., in what is certainly an understatement. “My father studied mechanical engineering and loves DIY projects. He would help my sister and me build little science projects. My mother, a computer scientist, introduced me to programming in BASIC in elementary school, sparking my fascination with instructing computers to perform tasks. I like to understand the reasons behind why something works.”
By the time she entered middle school, Damaraju, now 27, knew a career in science was her destiny. Where that destiny will lead her is still being determined, but, with her education, experience, and determination, her success is quite certain.
After completing high school in her home city of Mumbai, India, that education, experience, and determination took her to the Madras (Chennai) branch of the India Institutes of Technology (IIT), one of 23 prestigious IITs in the nation.
How prestigious? In 2015, when Damaraju took the entrance exams, she needed to score in the top 10,000 – out of 1.3 million students – less than 1 percent.
At IIT Madras, she established and led the Biotech Research Club, dedicated to developing an interest in Biology that included graduate research presentations, laboratory workshops, student-led journal clubs, and a science magazine. Between 2015 and 2020, she completed both Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Biological Sciences, as well as internships in 2018 and 2019 in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University. Her Master’s thesis focused on building ML models estimating gestational age in Indian women.
After completing her Master’s Degree, Damaraju was determined to pursue another Master’s, advancing her knowledge and understanding of public health, and seeking “to learn what does it take to build an accurate computational model to address a health care problem.”
She was accepted at Columbia University and started the program in Biostatistics online in 2020, before moving to New York in 2021.
“It was unreal going for a public health degree during a pandemic,” she said. “Until then I was looking at public health from a purely academic perspective. I was beginning to realize how important public health is to the world. I was thinking ‘Wow, I feel like a superhero now.’”
Damaraju said it was “overwhelming” to learn of an entire new discipline – biostatistics – as compared to taking one or two courses in the field as an undergrad.
“I liked how deep each course went and the overall the exposure the discipline gave me, the different programs, the different styles of public health, even the different departments in within the field of public health,” she said. “I was curious about how people were using genetics for public health – there is a lot of opportunity in this field.”
One opportunity that was especially meaningful for Damaraju was a three-month internship in 2021 as a computational biologist with Inflammatix Inc., a molecular diagnostics company based in Sunnyvale, California. Her task was to derive a gene expression signature for the development of a diagnostic device for Lupus patients.
“I learned that applying science to healthcare problems is not a single domain problem,” she said. “It’s not as easy as taking a bunch of data and writing a bunch of code, and then seeing results. From the public health perspective, there are several relevant questions to ask: ‘Are we using diverse data? Why is this particular population not represented? How are study participants being consented for?'”
As a result, Damaraju realized she “wanted to be more than a computational biologist.” “I knew I wanted to learn these other population-related and public health aspects of science, so I can understand what is takes to make something translational,” she said.
As a result, when she finished her Master’s at Columbia and chose to pursue a Ph.D., Damaraju explored universities with an emphasis on making research clinically relevant and practical. That search led her to the Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics at the University of Washington, at which she was paired with a faculty mentor, Alison Fohner, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology. Fohner mentioned the Institute for Public Health Genetics, an interdisciplinary program.
Even though Damaraju looked at other schools, the choice was obvious: “This is where I want to be.”
She arrived at the UW in 2022 and, at the Miller lab, she focuses on evaluating long-read sequencing for clinical use by building computational tools and analyzing the cost-effectiveness for individuals with rare genetic diseases.
“Nikhita has significantly advanced our team's research by leading our long-read assembly efforts and developing methods to evaluate how well long-reads can phase variants,” Miller said. “Her contributions have not only led to a co-authored publication in a leading journal, but have also fostered a more collaborative and dynamic environment within the lab. She’s an excellent programmer and teacher, which has had a huge positive impact on everyone in the lab.
She also collaborates with Brian Shirts, M.D., Ph.D, Director of the Institute for Public Health Genetics. The three are building a partnership to combine expertise in Long-Read Sequencing, statistical genetics, and clinical genetic testing to help bridge disparate areas of genomic medicine.
Shirts is impressed with Damaraju’s skills and commitment to public health.
“Nikhita combines a curiosity, ambition, bioinformatics skills, and a sincere desire improve the human condition,” he said. “This is a unique and powerful combination.”
