Aakash Patel
Data Science Fellow
Department: Computer Science
Advisors: David van Dijk
Aakash is a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at Yale, specializing in machine learning for biomedicine. His research focuses on large-scale pretraining and representation learning to build foundation models for biological and neuroscientific data. His work utilizes generative and language-conditioned frameworks, specifically tokenizing biological data for LLM architectures and using reinforcement learning to align model outputs with biological constraints to improve reasoning for applications like perturbation prediction, virtual screening, and autonomous hypothesis generation. Prior to coming to Yale, he earned a dual Master’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
What do you do with Data Science?
I'm excited to participate in seminars and workshops to broaden my knowledge of data science and discover new applications outside my main field of study!