Uthsav Chitra is an assistant professor of computer science, faculty in the Data Science and AI Institute, and a member of the Center for Computational Biology at the Johns Hopkins University. His research broadly develops machine learning methods for analyzing high-dimensional and multimodal biological data, with a focus on understanding the organization and dynamics of genes, proteins, and cells in healthy and diseased settings.
Using tools from deep learning, statistical inference, graph theory, spatial statistics, and geometry, his recent work includes the development of “gene expression topography”—a new mathematical and deep learning framework for spatial sequencing data—and statistical methods for learning biological interactions and anomaly detection in biological interaction networks. Chitra’s research has been recognized with several awards, including a Rising Stars in Data Science award, a Best Paper Award at the Research in Computational Molecular Biology satellite workshop on Computational Cancer Biology, a Siebel Scholarship, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
He received his PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2024 and an ScB in mathematics, AB in computer science, and AB in applied mathematics from Brown University in 2017. Chitra was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and a software engineer at Facebook.