murakdar (at) {mit dot edu, gmail dot com, hotmail dot com} or [firstname]@[lastname].org
I am a graduate student at MIT, where I have been working on computational methods for HIV vaccine design, while pursuing a PhD in Chemical Engineering with Arup Chakraborty.
Until 2011, I attended the University of Delaware for two degrees: Bachelor in Chemical Engineering (Honors, with Distinction) and Bachelor of Science in Physics (Honors, with a concentration in Chemical Physics).
My goal is to impact health by understanding biology through a computational lens. My research spans multiple fields including physics, immunology, computer science. As such, my skills, training, and experience are diverse: simple mathematical modeling of stochastic processes; design and implementation of novel algorithms to identify best protein targets of an adaptive immune response; develop theory to identify features of optimal vaccination protocols that elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs).
I spent a summer at Stone Ridge Technology to develop a program for financial options pricing on graphics processing units (GPUs), using CUDA and OpenCL. Compared to a parallel OpenMP implementation on CPU, the GPU version achieved 30-fold speed-up.
I also have a passion for teaching and mentorship, most prominently through my role as a Graduate Resident Tutor (GRT) at Burton Conner.
My love of languages extends from the natural ones to computer programming languages. Born in Poland and raised America, I am a native speaker of English and Polish. I studied Japanese, German, and Latin for 4 years in school each, and continued self-studying Japanese ever since. I know basic American Sign Language from several months of classes, and I taught myself to read Korean (Hangul) and Hindi, though I barely know any words. I am fluent in C, C++, Python, MATLAB, Mathematica, Bash, and LaTeX. I have working knowledge of JavaScript, R, Fortran, HTML, CSS, and Java. I can understand SQL, Haskell, Scheme/Lisp, BASIC, and x86 Assembly, though I can not write them as well as I'd like. Always on the hunt to learn and use more languages!
Code samples are available in my various repositories at src.murakowski.org or on GitHub. They are released as Free Software (a term I've come to prefer over "open source") under the strongest freedom-preserving license I know, the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPLv3). I am always open to feedback about and collaboration on my projects! If you use the code or its results anywhere, I'd also love to know! E-mail me any time (address at top of page).
For inspiration about sleep, memory, learning, creativity, education, and neuroscience, I go to Piotr Wozniak, the author of SuperMemo; check out incremental reading! My other hobbies include Diplomacy, Contract Bridge, Blender, and classical piano.
Below, = denotes equal contribution, and # denotes corresponding author.