Ayan Paul

Ayan Paul is a research scientist on the AI + Life Sciences team. Currently, Ayan’s research is focused on charting RNA biology using multi-omics data. He focuses on the specific processes that drive transcriptome and protein diversity. His work leads to insights on both cell/tissue differentiation and disease causing genetic variants. He uses graph neural networks and large language models to study genetic sequences and their interaction with RNA binding proteins. His work will aid in the development of targeted therapeutics for diseases that arise from complex traits.

Ayan has published work in theoretical particle physics (Higgs physics and heavy quark physics), symmetry and symmetry breaking, quantum field theory, mathematical epidemiology, computational socioeconomics, interpretable machine learning and genetics. He received his doctorate in theoretical particle physics from the University of Notre Dame du Lac and was a postdoctoral fellow at INFN, Rome. Before joining the Institute for Experiential AI in 2022, he was a fellow at DESY and a senior scientist at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Ayan contributed to the theoretical predictions that led to the discovery of CP violation in charm mesons, the second most significant discovery at CERN after the discovery of the Higgs Boson. He has contributed to the design of larger future particle colliders. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayan contributed significantly to the understanding of the spread of the diseases and why automated contact tracing would fail without population-wide participation. He was PI for grants funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Ministry of Education and Research, Germany, to model disease transmission and develop interpretable machine learning methods to study the impact of socioeconomic disparities around the spread of COVID-19.

He is also actively involved in technology transfer and is the cofounder of CoVis Inc. and KarmaV Inc. For CoVis, he developed algorithms for individual disease risk prediction which was used for the CoVis app as a pandemic mitigation response in Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the United States. He is the chief scientific officer of KarmaV, a company that focuses on algorithmic implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) for workforce transformation and recruitment. Ayan is a member of the Steering Committee for the Asian Faculty and Staff affinity group at Northeastern University. He has led several initiatives for DE&I in Germany and the United States and is also in a leadership role for the sustainability in science initiative started by the High Energy Physics community.