Venky Soundararajan PhD

Venky Soundararajan, Ph.D. is an entrepreneur, scientist, and inventor. As the chief evangelist for inference, Dr. Soundararajan has been instrumental in building the long-term strategic partnership with the Mayo Clinic, by enabling the automated de-identification of EHRs to protect patient privacy and their machine-augmented curation to unlock real-time biomedical insights. By harnessing this distinctive platform, Dr. Soundararajan has led multi-year R&D data-science collaborations with some of the world’s largest enterprises.

These collaborations have spanned a broad spectrum of clinical-genomic applications, ranging from the discovery of novel medicine and diagnostic solutions to the quantification of real-world epidemiological outcomes such as the impact of mass vaccination on pandemics. Dr. Soundararajan’s scientific research on the COVID-19 pandemic has led to multiple breakthroughs that have shaped public health policy. Some of these salient contributions include decoding the earliest signals of COVID-19 onset, identifying the reservoirs of SARS- CoV-2 infectivity at single-cell resolution, genomic epidemiology for pinpointing the emergence of variants of concern, and publishing the world’s first real-world studies validating the effectiveness, safety, and durability of the COVID-19 vaccines.

Beyond pandemic preparedness, Dr. Soundararajan’s research has resulted in the identification of multiple tumor-specific antigens and decoding the earliest signals for detecting chronic diseases like pulmonary hypertension from raw ECG waveforms. His ultimate mission is to teach machines how to read and comprehend all forms of biological data and clinical knowledge, towards the vision of transforming healthcare to benefit every patient and care provider in our world. Dr. Soundararajan has authored over 50 scientific papers and patents. His scientific findings have been covered widely by mainstream media and cited by multiple public health agencies, regulatory bodies, and governments. Dr. Soundararajan completed his Fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School and received his Ph.D. from MIT in Biological Engineering and his Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).