Aidan Lakshman

Welcome to my website! My name is Aidan Lakshman, and I’m a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. My research advisor is Dr. Erik Wright (lab website). I’m funded through the National Library of Medicine’s T-15 training grant, and am on track to graduate in Spring 2025.

My research investigates what trends in evolution are only revealed when analyzing millions of genomes. More specifically, I’m using phylogenetic information to build co-evolution networks, which are weighted directed graphs that encode correlated evolutionary pressures on groups of genes and/or proteins. My plan is to use these to conduct a large-scale analysis of prokaryotic evolution across the tree of life, and then use this to develop a novel automated data-driven hierarchical system for classifying and predicting gene function. The code I’ve written is published as part of the SynExtend package on Bioconductor.

I’ve worked in a variety of industries and research labs over the years, including software engineering at Amazon Web Services, machine learning research for traffic signal optimization at Carnegie Mellon University, and causal modeling research at University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.

While at AWS, I worked on open source projects designed for helping researchers in biomedical informatics. The main project I contributed to was Service Workbench on AWS, a free platform intended to take the complexity out of provisioning cloud resources, allowing researchers to focus more on doing research and less on how to configure the cloud. I also contributed to FHIR Works on AWS, a FHIR-compliant NoSQL database built on AWS.

I’m always interested in new collaborations and projects, so feel free to reach out if you’re interested in discussing anything related to my current or prior research. My contact info is on the sidebar, and my CV is located here.