PhD Student Srijit Seal awarded Clare Hall Boak Student Support Fund to present research
Congratulations to Srijit Seal, a third-year PhD student at the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University, who won an award from the Clare Hall Boak Student Support Fund to present his research at the 2023 Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee.
Srijit’s research uses machine learning to detect drug safety and toxicity using cell morphology, gene structure, and chemical structure. During the conference, Srijit presented two first-author papers on detecting toxicity signals using machine learning, including one on predicting cytotoxicity using Cell Painting readouts and another on identifying mitochondrial toxicity by combining gene expression with Cell Painting.
In addition, Srijit presented his work on predicting human PK parameters which received one of the top ten risk assessment abstract awards at the conference. Srijit collaborated with Uppsala University to develop a user-friendly GUI that can be accessed directly by end-users, and he worked with AbsoluteAI and PangeaBotanica to understand what the industry needs. He is also a member of the HESI eSTAR Discussion Group, which led the Cell Painting Symposium at SOT2023.
Srijit’s research garnered attention from pharmaceutical companies, and the conference provided him with an opportunity to receive constructive feedback and strengthen his collaborations to take full advantage of his PhD. Srijit is also a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In addition to his academic achievements, Srijit recently led a group of students to win the Accelerate Grant of £14k for organizing a conference and an interdisciplinary review on Machine learning, philosophy and biological sciences.
We wish Srijit well in the next stage of his career as he moves to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.