Founding member of new initiative in J&J’s External Innovation organization with the mandate to partner with digital health companies and healthcare systems to develop, incubate and launch commercially sustainable data science and digital health businesses that provide ‘here and now’ value to patients, providers and payers while delivering long-term strategic benefit to J&J.

Responsible for developing and leading internal and external data science programs; including academic/industry collaborations, public-private partnerships and consortia to gain mechanistic insight and discover novel drug targets/biomarkers that enable precision and predictive medicine in Neuropsychiatric and Neurodegenerative diseases. Special focus on discovery of digital biomarkers and development of evidence based digital health solutions that utilize data derived from wearable sensors and smartphones for early diagnosis, disease course monitoring and prediction of drug response and relapse in Mood Disorders, Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis.

Responsible for programs that utilize data, analytics and digital health technologies to transform research innovation capabilities across Janssen R&D.

As pharmaceutical industry as a whole moves into a more challenging phase, the current model of relying on block-busters designed for the ‘average patient’ is increasingly under pressure. All stake-holders (payers, patients, physicians) expect more customized solutions and increased value proposition from pharmaceutical products. We, at J&J Neurosciences, are embracing this challenge by focusing on a more personalized and holistic approach to therapeutic intervention that goes beyond the ‘pill’, to offer ‘integrative solutions’ for preventing, diagnosing, treating, and monitoring neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases.The Integrative Solutions group works across different clinical development programs and various commercial/scientific functional areas within J&J as well as with academic, governmental and industrial partners around the globe to enable discovery, development and commercialization of biomarkers, diagnostics and other information and/or technology based solutions that would form an ‘integrated solution’ centered around J&J neuroscience drugs.

Led a multidisciplinary Discovery and Development Informatics team consisting of technologists and scientists with advanced degrees. Responsible for the design and implementation of computational tools and methods required for managing, analyzing and interpreting the large and complex datasets to support drug discovery and development programs across Lilly Research Laboratories.

Participated in THE landmark Big Biology project of our times: the human genome project (J. Craig Venter et.al. Sequence of the Human Genome Science (2001) 291, 1304-1351). After making history by completing the sequencing of the human genome in the year 2000, Celera embarked on an ambitious proteomics initiative to catalogue disease specific proteins in cancer tissues and identify diagnostic and prognostic cancer markers from serum. As part of that effort, I led a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, algorithm developers, bioinformatics experts and statisticians to develop software infrastructure, data processing algorithms, and bioinformatics tools to support proteomics driven target and marker discovery.

Responsible for working closely with biologists, chemists and X-ray crystallographers to develop and implement bioinformatics and chemogenomics approaches to help prioritize drug targets.

Developed and implemented bioinformatics solutions for CuraGen’s gene sequencing and proteomics platforms. The work resulted in a Nature cover publication (Peter Uetz, Vaibhav Narayan et.al. A Comprehensive Analysis of Protein-Protein Interactions in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Nature (2000) 403, 623 – 627). CuraGen Corporation was subsequently acquired by Roche.