Gautam

Gautam joined us in September 2025 to support our deep learning work aimed to understand the role of codon usage bias in gene expression and protein output.

Biography

Gautam joined the lab as a Research Assistant, and is now a (soon-to-be) PhD student. He's currently trying to get neural nets fluent in mRNA sequences at a level beyond simple codon-frequency statistics, ideally learning the latent biological constraints driving codon usage bias. This interest traces back to IISc Bangalore, where he worked on machine learning for drug discovery, including designing a novel antagonist targeting inflammation in tuberculosis and developing self-supervised BERT models for protein–ligand interactions. It was there that he became fascinated by foundation models. He's chasing that same idea now using foundation models to make therapeutic discovery and development a little simpler, and hopefully more fun along the way.

Research positions

PhD Student (Oct 2026 - now)
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK

Research Assistant (Sep 2025 - Sep 2026)
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, UK

Research Assistant (Sep 2024 - Aug 2025)
Department of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India

Qualifications

• MSc in Chemical Sciences from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India, 2024
• BSc in Chemistry (Hons) from University of Delhi, India, 2022

Honours and awards

• Cambridge Trust Hibbitt Family International Scholarship for PhD in Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (Oct 2026)
• Travel award for 3rd Codon Usage Conference, Montreal, Canada (Jun 2026)

Key publications

• Kathuri A, Gautam, Singh S, Goel S, Ratnani S, Dwivedi P, Haque S, Sharma SK. Novel Amino Derivatives and Carboxamides of Chromen‐2‐one: Synthesis, Antimicrobial Activity, and Molecular Docking Studies, Chemistry–An Asian Journal, 2025. [URL]