Saket Navlakha, Ph.D.

Saket Navlakha is associate professor in the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). His lab studies algorithms in nature, i.e., how collections of molecules, cells and organisms process information and solve computational problems. The goal of Navlakha’s research is to use the language of computer science to understand the problem-solving strategies that biological systems have evolved to survive in the natural world. His current work focuses on identifying the data structures and algorithms implemented by neural circuits in the brain and branching networks of plant architectures to solve a range of computational problems.

For the Simons Pivot Fellowship, he will collaborate with mentor Hannah Meyer at CSHL to explore how the adaptive immune system solves machine learning problems. This will lead to new conceptual frameworks to understand the design of the adaptive immune system and how it overcomes challenges related to learning, generalization and discrimination. It will also reveal the fundamental algorithms (grounded in molecular and cellular mechanisms) driving self-protection and lead to improved solutions for cybersecurity and defense systems, which face similar challenges as biological defense systems.