Satwik Rajaram

Satwik Rajaram is an Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern Medical Center, with secondary appointments in the Department of Pathology and the Center for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases. He leads a multidisciplinary research group focused on applying machine learning to understand tissue organization in cancer and neurodegeneration.

His research interests lie at the intersection of computational biology, machine learning, and pathology. He develops biology-guided deep learning methods to decode tissue morphology, aiming to transform histopathological images into predictive biomarkers. His lab investigates kidney cancer heterogeneity, neurodegenerative tauopathies, and treatment response in rectal cancer using neoadjuvant radiotherapy. The group emphasizes interpretable AI, experimental design, and scalable computational pipelines.

The recent publications reflect a strong trend in applying deep learning and statistical modeling to high-throughput microscopy and genomic data, with a focus on cellular heterogeneity, tumor evolution, and disease stratification. His work bridges physics-inspired methods with biological discovery, particularly in oncology and neuroscience.

Dr. Rajaram has mentored several graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, including Aleksandra Nielsen, Sriya Veerapaneni, and Paul Acosta. His lab collaborates across disciplines and has developed open-source software tools such as PhenoRipper and SimuCell.

The Rajaram Lab operates in a dynamic, startup-like environment within a top-tier medical center, leveraging world-class computational resources like BioHPC and the Bioinformatics Core Facility. The team includes postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, data scientists, and computational biologists working on cutting-edge problems in computational pathology.