Second Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
29 October -2 November 2022

Dr Sandhya Xirasagar (Participant)

Dr. Sandhya Xirasagar serves as a Program Director in the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Office of Genomic Data Science since July 2022. She manages a portfolio of grants with special emphasis on Training and Tool development in AI and ML approaches in genomics. She provides scientific expertise and support for computational genomics and data science activities, participating in NHGRI and trans-National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded consortia and working groups. Prior to joining NHGRI, Dr. Xirasagar was at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for over 10 years where she led Clinical Genomics and Laboratory Informatics Initiatives at the Bioinformatics & Computational Biosciences Branch in the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology (OCICB). She led the development of software resources to enable collaborative and standardized genomic data analysis, management and sharing including the PapillomaVirus Episteme (PaVE) which provides highly organized and curated papillomavirus genomics information and tools to the scientific community for research on the Papillomaviridae family of viruses. Clinical genomics initiatives that she led include the Genomic Research Integration System (GRIS) which enables clinical genomics analysis by NIAID intramural researchers and their collaborators at other NIH ICs, and the Host Genomics Repository to facilitate data science approaches for clinical and genomic data.