Hey there, I am Chandra!

Short for Chandrasekhar (which somehow ended up as “Chandra Sekhar” on official paperwork).

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in the JSB lab, hosted by the wonderful Jessica Li. My research focuses on characterizing and exploiting structure in high-dimensional biological data to obtain a deeper understanding of cellular and molecular processes.

I graduated in May of 2026 with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. My primary research focus was on the theoretical and applied aspects of unsupervised learning, spanning manifold clustering, dimensionality reduction, and community detection for stochastic block models. My PhD advisor was Prof. Jiapeng Zhang.

Before that, I spent two amazing years at the Indian Statistical Institute as a Master’s student, where I was fortunate to work under the guidance of Prof. Subhamoy Maitra on theoretical computer science, cryptology, and quantum information theory.

I was introduced to theoretical computer science and mentored in academic research by Prof. Subhashis Majumdar during my undergraduate studies at the Heritage Institute of Technology, which has shaped my path forward since.

Updates

I have joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center as a postdoctoral research fellow, starting summer 2026!

Teaching

Besides my research, teaching is my favorite aspect of pursuing a PhD. I have had the opportunity to be a TA for various courses during my time at USC, as well as take part in K-12 outreach and REU (more details in teaching). I look forward to teaching a full course at some point in the near future.