Utkarsh Mahamune

ESR 11 – Understanding auto-immune disorders through computational modelling

My name is Utkarsh Mahamune, I come from India. I have a bachelor’s degree (BTech) in computer science and engineering from India. I have worked within the IT-sector for a couple of years, simultaneously working on my e-commerce start-up. I was always fascinated by the work and research in the field of medical science, life sciences and thus I pursued my master’s degree in computational life sciences from Jacobs University Bremen (Germany), in pursuit of getting the best of both, computer science and life science, with a futuristic outlook for a better society.

During my master’s degree program, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marc-Thorsten Huett for my master’s degree thesis on transcriptomic data for NAFLD patients with genomic-scale metabolic models to understand the disease progression using the network biology approaches. For a lab rotation, I worked with Prof. Dr. Agostino Merico on a research project to develop an agent-based model, considering different ways in which various sources of information are filtered due to cognitive biases for sea-level change. I will be joining Prof. Dr. Antoine van Kampen’s group to understand auto-immune disorders through various computational modeling approaches.

I am excited to be a part of the ARCAID project, where I can utilize my cross-disciplinary knowledge in autoimmune disease research. Outside of research, I like to travel, I love cooking and like to explore different cuisines. I also have a fondness for photography.