Somali Chaterji (pronounced shoh-MAH-lee CHA-ter-jee) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University, where she leads the Innovatory for Cells and Neural Machines [ICAN]. ICAN specializes in developing algorithms and statistical models for IoT and edge computing on the one hand and genome engineering on the other. Read more about ICAN’s research updates here.
Dr. Chaterji got her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University, winning the Chorafas International Award (2010), College of Engineering Best Dissertation Award (2010), and the Future Faculty Fellowship Award (2009). She did her Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, where her work was supported by an American Heart Association award [2010-2013]. Given her expertise in genome engineering and machine learning, she followed this up with another post-doctoral stint at Purdue University in the Department of Computer Science [2014-2017]. She also received the Seed-for-Success Award from Purdue University's Excellence in Research Awards program in recognition of her NIH R01 award in 2016. This NIH award focuses on developing cyberinfrastructure for the world’s largest metagenomics repository, MG-RAST, housed in Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Essentially, this is what resulted in the innovations in database technologies mapping the configuration parameters of noSQL (scalable) databases to time-varying workloads in healthcare and IoT. Read more about this innovation here and here, resulting in two patent-pending technologies available for licensing by Purdue’s Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC).
Dr. Chaterji is a technology commercialization enthusiast and has consulted for the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also an innovator in applied machine learning algorithms for practitioners and developed two new courses for both IoT and genomics practitioners in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020, the latter being a Capstone-style course through a partnership between Purdue University and Berkeley through the Plaksha Tech Leaders Fellowship.
Here is a succinct vision statement for Somali’s research and here is a video summary of the research activities at ICAN.