Swanand Rakhade

Medical Student
Columbia University

Swanand Rakhade is a 4th year medical student at Columbia University, applying into Internal Medicine. He is originally from Houston and graduated from UT Austin with a degree in Computational Biology. He became interested in cancer biology while at UT, and gained experience in structure-based drug discovery, X-ray crystallography, and live cellular imaging. As a medical student, he was awarded an NIH T35 grant for his work with Dr. Yvonne Saenger to develop immunological and histological biomarkers for melanoma using machine learning. Additionally, he collaborated with the Dermatology Imaging Informatics Group at MSKCC to develop tools for melanoma detection. He hopes to eventually pursue an academic career in Oncology focused on utilizing computational tools to further understand tumor plasticity and the tumor microenvironment.