Steffanie Paul

Hometown: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Academic background/research experience:

I did my undergrad at Harvard College in Molecular and Cellular Biology and started doing computational biology research halfway through my degree. After graduating I worked as computational biologist at a Biotech company for a year before starting my PhD.

Research area:

I'm interested in Explainable Artificial Intelligence. I've worked on developing interpretability tools to understand what Deep Learning models are learning from data. I find this field exciting because Deep learning models have been shown to be great at performing tasks, but what's more interesting to me is whether we can use these models to learn more about data and therefore biology.

Why did you choose BIG?

Harvard Medical School has an amazing assortment of faculty to work with. Moreover, as a biomedical researcher, Boston is the place to be with the variety of hospitals and diverse biotech companies it holds.