Appetizers

Starting with some basics.

Fun Starters

Getting to know the human side.

Main Course

A quick deep dive into the day-to-day job.

Tell us about yourself and your job.

There are over 10 million epilepsy patients in the world that don’t respond to medication and continue to have seizures, thus the only available treatment is to surgically remove the brain area responsible for seizures. However, surgery is only 50% effective because there is no test that can pinpoint the epileptic brain regions. I developed a quantitative test, using brain waves, that highlights the most epileptic brain regions, which would enable improved diagnosis of epilepsy and help guide surgical treatment of patients leading to seizure freedom.

How did you end up in your field? What do you like about it?

Since my undergraduate days at UCSD, I was very interested in scientific research and specifically, computational and mathematical approaches to solving medical problems. I was fortunate to have rotated with Dr. Sridevi Sarma at JHU and was really captivated by the complexities of epilepsy research. I get to work with world-class clinicians, researchers and think about ways to improve the quality of care for a highly debilitating disease. I like working on computers, thinking about mathematical models, and writing good software.

What does a typical morning look like on the job?

Typically, I wake up and I check my email (doesn't everyone?), and then I make breakfast and do some yoga. Being in research typically means you have pretty flexible hours. Your goal is to make progress on research projects that can be turned into publications, or products. I then pretty much meet with collaborators a few times throughout the day and then spend my time writing Python code and scripts for running computational analyses on datasets.

Cool, then what does a typical afternoon look like?

Some more coding and experimentation on datasets. I might skim or read some scientific papers in the afternoon to wind down.

What types of projects and meetings are you involved in?

My work is heavily project-based. There are many hypotheses that drive a specific research direction, and your goal is to generate data and results that can either validate or invalidate that hypothesis. We are interested in all sorts of questions, such as:

i) how can you locate epileptic brain regions from EEG data, or ii) can you predict epilepsy using EEG data.

I typically meet with my principal investigator (or PI), who is my professor advisor, or other Ph.D./postdoctoral researchers to discuss progress on projects. These typically involve the review of some new figures that someone generated and the interpretation of those figures in the context of our data analysis.

Who do you collaborate with within meetings and projects?

Neurologists, neurosurgeons, ER doctors, and other researchers. It's exciting! You always want to be surrounded by a diverse group of people so that you can learn. It's very difficult to make significant progress when you only work by yourself.

Dessert

Now for some juicy insights in the tea room.

What's the most challenging thing about your job?

I would say the most challenging aspect of my job is to validate or invalidate our high-level scientific hypotheses. In order to do so, I must formulate specific sequences of questions that can be answered by data, which then arrive at a conclusion.

What are some characteristics that can help someone succeed in your role?

Knowing how to think critically and logically. Knowing some math and statistics. Knowing how to code.

Any advice on how to stand out and get hired for those just starting off?

Contribute to open-source software and develop 1-3 (don't bog yourself down by being involved in everything) projects that you can demonstrate significant contributions and results.

What's something that surprised you about your job?

How fun it was. I work sometimes all day (wake up to sleep), and I don't mind because the activities I'm involved in are very fulfilling.

What do you see your next step being?

Eventually, I would like to be a tenure-track professor at a university. However, those positions are pretty competitive and rare, so I am also considering working as a research/data scientist in the startup medical technology space.

Any last thoughts, advice, or recommendations for someone who wants to do what you do?

Get involved in research early. If you want to do computational stuff that requires coding, get involved in open-source software to demonstrate you know how to code well.

Drinks

Chat more over coffee or tea?