Shardul Paricharak is in the final phase of his PhD in cheminformatics at Cambridge University (UK) and Leiden University, where he develops and applies in silico data-driven methods to improve activity modeling and efficiency of high-throughput screens.

More information about Shardul Paricharak

I started my undergraduate training as an experimental biologist (at Leiden University and TU Delft), but soon discovered my interest for the computational side of biology, during an Erasmus exchange program at Lund University (Sweden) where I underwent a 6-month training in bioinformatics. Fascinated by in silico approaches, I then gained further experience in bioinformatics (gene expression analysis, software development, database programming) during an undergraduate internship at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), and a summer job at Galapagos B.V.

During my master in pharmaceutical sciences at Utrecht University, I did another bioinformatics internship at UMC Utrecht, where I worked on genome sequencing data. During this master, I also got an opportunity to do an internship at Cambridge University (UK), where I worked on cheminformatics (QSAR, PCM). I then received a personal grant for a PhD at Cambridge University and Leiden University, during which I planned to further delve into the intricacies of cheminformatics (data analysis, machine learning). During my PhD, I worked for Novartis (Switzerland), where I worked on applying computational methods to improve the efficiency of high-throughput screens, and discovered my current passion for data science.

My research has led to 7 peer-reviewed publications so far, with more envisaged by the end of my PhD. In addition, I have obtained a personal grant (NWO Mosaic), and several scholarships/prizes (Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Pieter Beijer scholarship, Hendrik Muller Vaderlandsch Fonds scholarship, Huygens Scholarship, Fundatie van Renswoude grant, ECHO award 2009 nominee).

Publications