PhD Career Connections: Bioinformatics
PhD Career Connections is excited to welcome back alumnus Akshata Udyavar, PhD, Senior Scientist Bioinformatics, Arcus Biosciences inc.
Please join us as she discusses her career path after Vanderbilt
Friday April 12, 2019
10am
Light Hall 214
Registration Requested
Dr. Akshata Udyavar is a Senior Scientist and the head of Bioinformatics at Arcus Biosciences, Inc., a clinical-stage biotech focused on creating innovative cancer immunotherapies in the Bay Area. Her current work spans from novel target discovery, preclinical development to prognostic and predictive biomarker discovery in cancer immunotherapy clinical trials. Her work at Arcus has resulted in two patents as well as several presentations at international meetings. Akshata obtained her Masters in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Tennessee and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital with a research focus on understanding the role of T cell receptor point mutations in the pathology of multiple sclerosis. She graduated with a PhD in Chemical and Physical Biology from Vanderbilt University, discovering mechanisms underlying phenotypic heterogeneity in Small-Cell Lung Cancer in the laboratories of Drs. Vito Quaranta and Pierre Massion. Her thesis work resulted in a patent as well as publications with a F1000Prime recommended article in Cancer Research journal. Together with a Certificate in Molecular Medicine, she made a transition into her great passion of the marriage between computational biology and translational research. Her versatile training in immunology, translational oncology and computational biology led her into an Associate Scientist position in Bioinformatics at Genentech where she focused on retrospective biomarker analyses of oncology and immuno-oncology clinical trials, publishing several research articles. Akshata enjoys long walks with her dogs and dance parties with her two toddlers