Swagatam Mukhopadhyay

Swagatam is a theoretical physicist by training with a decade of experience and leadership in quantitative thinking in biology. He has extensive research experience, both in academia and industry, applying/advancing computational methods in biological datasets. After earning his doctorate degree in Condensed Matter Theory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he did a post-doctoral fellowship within the physics department at University of California, Santa Barbara on glassy and disordered media. He then moved to Rutgers University, where he worked at the crossroads of theory and experiments on epigenetic gene silencing and higher-order chromatin organization. He joined Cold Spring Harbor Lab and worked as a Computational Scientist in the field of Autism Genomics, computational neuroanatomy, and RNAi. After a brief stint in investigating the role of non-coding variants in large-scale human genomics at Human Longevity Inc., he joined the functional genomics team at Ionis Pharmaceuticals where he optimized and helped create some of the high-throughput assays used to understand both antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) pharmacology and disease models. Swagatam was instrumental in demonstrating the value of using quantitative methods to unravel ASO sequence-function relationships that helped explain oligonucleotide chemistry experimental observations. His work also led to dramatic improvements in lead-identification screening efficiencies.