Hi! My name is Nirali Somia and I'm currently a first year PhD student in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program through Health Sciences and Technology (HST) at Harvard and MIT. I am coadvised by Dr. Bill Lotter and Dr. Isaac Kohane. I'm currently interested in AI interpretability, evaluation, and alignment in healthcare.

My research journey started in highschool with Dr. Lihsia Chen at the University of Minnesota. I worked with C. Elegans and, though I'm completely dry lab now, I will always have a bit of a soft spot for those worms. I received my B.S. in computer science and minors in biology and writing from Washington University in St. Louis. During college I did the summer research program through NYU's Center for Data Science and worked with Dr. Grace Lindsay. After I graduated from WashU I was a PREP scholar at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Dr. Peter Koo's lab.

I mostly started this website to practice making difficult concepts more accessible by writing blogs about them! I also wanted to just generally force myself to write more. You can find some of those posts here.

Overall, I think the whole point of life is to learn and to love; I feel very lucky to get to do just that day after day. Outside of science I like to read fiction and poetry, crochet, rock climb, and listen to music. Some of my favorite poets and authors are Mary Oliver, Ada Limon, and Ocean Vuong! If you'd like to learn more about what I enjoy reading, watching, and listening to, I wrote a little bit about that here :)