Smita Krishnaswamy

Smita Krishnaswamy is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Computer Science at Yale University, with joint appointments in the Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science. She leads the Krishnaswamy Lab, which focuses on developing machine learning and deep learning methods to analyze high-dimensional biomedical data. Her work integrates geometric deep learning, signal processing, and topological data analysis to study complex biological systems, including immunology, cancer, neuroscience, and developmental biology.

Dr. Krishnaswamy holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan and completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. She is affiliated with the Wu Tsai Institute, Institute for Foundations of Data Science, and Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program at Yale. Her research has led to innovations like PHATE visualization, MELD analysis, and geometric scattering frameworks, which are widely used in biomedical research.

Her scientific achievements include the Excellence in Science Early-Career Investigator Award (FASEB, 2022) and the Yale Cancer Center Class of '61 Award (2025). She collaborates extensively with clinicians and researchers to translate computational methods into clinical applications, such as predicting stroke etiology and modeling Alzheimer’s disease progression.

The Krishnaswamy Lab’s projects span drug discovery, single-cell analysis, and medical image segmentation, with a focus on developing open-source tools like MAGIC, SAUCIE, and TrajectoryNet. Their work bridges theoretical foundations of data science with practical biomedical challenges, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations across Yale and beyond.