UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Doctoral student Divyanshi Srivastava has been awarded the Academic Computing Fellowship. The fellowship, established in 1987, is offered through a partnership between the Graduate School and Penn State Information Technology Services.
The Academic Computing Fellowship Program supports research doctorate students who have a background and strong interest in computing applications within their disciplines. Through support provided by the fellowship and the use of computing resources, students develop and disseminate new methods for problem solving within their disciplines.
A doctoral student in bioinformatics and genomics, Srivastava has focused her research on the development of deep learning applications for understanding gene regulatory systems. Srivastava has stated that the ultimate aim of her research is to design efficient clinical tissue engineering systems.
Her graduate adviser, Shaun Mahony, expects that Srivastava’s research, “will result in both broadly applicable bioinformatics tools and unprecedented levels of insight into gene regulation.”
According to Mahony, Srivastava’s research, “aims to understand why highly related gene-regulatory proteins can have very different effects on gene expression programs, even when they are introduced into exactly the same cell type. This is a fundamental problem underlying our understanding of development, cellular programming, and many diseases.”
To solve this problem, Srivastava is, “developing deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks that pull together large numbers of large genomic datasets in order to understand the cellular context in which various regulatory mechanisms occur.”
Srivastava was honored during the annual Graduate Student Awards Luncheon held on April 25 at the Nittany Lion Inn.