Bio:

Nivedita joined the Allen Institute for Cell Science as a Scientist on the Assay Development team in 2021. Prior to joining the institute, she was a Research Scientist at Institute for Systems Biology where her work focused on determination of mechanisms underlying development of drug resistance in cells. She worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Pharmacology Department at University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill from 2016-2019. At UNC, she conducted research to determine mechanisms that regulate cell state transitions by studying cellular signal transduction pathways. She combined microfluidic lab-on-chip devices, live-cell imaging, and image analysis to monitor single cell behavior. Nivedita obtained her PhD from University of Cincinnati. Her dissertation focused on development of lab-on-chip devices for size-based cell sorting followed by subsequent image-based data analysis. The applications of her work encompassed fractionation of blood into red and white blood cells and sorting cancer stem cells from tissue-biopsies.

My overarching research interests involve understanding cell behavior in pathological and therapeutic context. Specifically, I am interested in how cells transition between different states and how the state change affects cellular organization. My work focuses on advanced data analysis approaches including implementation of image processing pipelines, feature extraction and parameter design to develop robust, quantitative analyses for image-based assays of cell dynamics, organization, and states.