Aarti Venkat, PhD, Assistant
Professor, Department of Medicine, Section of Biomedical Data Science Dr. Venkat is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Biomedical Data Science and the Director of Clinical
Informatics at the Center for Translational Data Science (CTDS). She completed her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the University of Chicago, and joined Tempus Labs, a precision oncology company where she served as the Associate Director of Bioinformatics. There, she developed clinical bioinformatics pipelines and algorithms for applications in oncology and germline genetics. Armed with dual experience from academia and industry, she returned to the University to combine her academic research with her clinical interests. The goal of Dr. Venkat’s research is to develop computational infrastructure and machine learning pipelines for large omics datasets to uncover the genetic basis of diseases. She has developed a patented algorithm that uses tumor
normal matched sequencing data to match solid tumor patients to PARP inhibitors. At CTDS, she is the co PI of the Biomedical Research Hub (BRH), a data ecosystem that interoperates with over sixteen petabytes of data scattered in several cloud based data repositories generated for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases. The BRH provides a central location to search and discover from diverse data repositories. She is also working with clinical and molecular data from the national Veteran Affairs health system to uncover molecular markers for prostate and lung cancer
among military veterans. Dr. Venkat is co leading several other projects at CTDS under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Grossman. These include the development of software technology that enables cancer researchers to easily spin up a data commons a platform that co locates data with computing resources. She is also leading the development of reproducible containerized workflows for disease research and actively working with Dr. Grossman on developing Large Language Models for efficient search and discovery from disease data. On a personal note, Dr. Venkat loves mentoring young women for careers in STEM and computational fields. She has a 2 year old daughter who she enjoys speaking to in several Indian languages. She loves running and enjoys
exploring Chicago with her husband, a cellist.