Hello! My name is Ghulam Murtaza, and I commonly go by my nickname GM. I am currently doing my Ph.D. at Brown under the tutelage of Dr. Ritambhara Singh. I am primarily interested in developing techniques that synthetically or computationally improve the quality of Biological datasets, with a primary aim to support my broader goal of democratizing access to opportunities for conducting “good” science. Apart from that, I am advising undergraduate and masters students on projects that try to create representations to solve various downstream tasks that combine multiple modalities in context of the underlying biology.

Previously, I have worked with Dr. Theophillus Benson, Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Dr. Mobin Javed Mukhtar, and Dr. Zaffar Ayyub Qazi on various projects under the broad umbrella of trying to ensure fair and equal access to resources available on the internet. My previous work has attempted to bridge the gap in opportunities that arise due to unfair access to technology.

I am open to collaborating on any project with an underlying aim to improve technology access, particularly for marginalized communities and third-world countries. I have recently developed a deep interest in understanding Aging; please feel free to contact me if you are interested in having a conversation about it!

Besides all the research work, I enjoy running, biking and swimming! I did my first half marathon this May and my first 55-mile bike ride last year September. I at some point in my life want to finish at least one Ironman challenge (fingers crossed). Apart from that I enjoy reading about human behavior and psychology (Behave got me started on this), playing tennis, cooking and more recently woodworking (thanks to brown’s amazing design workshop)!

You can reach out to me on my work email: ghulam_murtaza@brown.edu.

Current Interests:

• Deep Learning, Representation Learning, Computational Biology, Epigenetics and Genomics

---