Hi! I’m Vikram Shivakumar, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University (CS) with a NSF graduate research fellowship. I am currently working under the supervision of Dr. Ben Langmead, working on developing efficient computational methods for genomic analysis.

A bit more about me

I grew up in northern Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C. I went to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Tech (2017), and obtained my B.S. in Bioengineering (minor in Computer Science) from the University of California, Berkeley (2020). I also recieved a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University (2023).

Research Background

I’ve been fortunate to work with PIs who have provided invaluable mentorship over the years. I worked at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Zimmer, studying the phylogenomics of the Curry tree. I worked on clinical variant discovery and molecular dynamics with Dr. Matthew McCoy at Georgetown University. At UC Berkeley, I was advised by Dr. Liana Lareau, applying machine learning methods to predict translation efficiency with ribosome profiling.

For my PhD research, I work on applying compressed indexing methods to scale analysis of large pangenomes (collections of reference genome assemblies) to reduce reference bias and enable inclusive genomic experiments.

Contact me

Please reach out to me about any of my current/previous research work by email: vshivak1 [at] jhu [.] edu