Sonia is a computational biologist working in the area of small open reading frames and RNA translation in human diseases. She completed her PhD with A/Prof Owen Rackham’s, Prof Stuart Cook’s and Prof. Sebastian Schafer’s research groups at Duke-NUS medicine school. Prior to which she has worked across industry and research institutes such as Philips Research and A*STAR after completing her bachelors and masters from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Carnegie Mellon University respectively.
She has developed approaches to identify novel targets in human disease by integrating several different next-generation sequencing technologies (Ribo-seq, RNA-seq, CLIP-seq, single-cell RNA-seq). She has applied these approaches to changes in human cardiac fibrosis and identified the RNA-binding protein network in cardiac scarring which was further shown to be active in patients with cardiac fibrosis.
She is currently working on developing an atlas of human micropeptides across various human cell-types and tissues. This work involves integrating large amounts of data, applying multiple algorithms and developing an easily available resource for researchers.