Bio:

Simmi Mourya is currently a Software Engineer II at the Allen Institute, where she focuses on building advanced analysis pipelines for sequencing experiments. Her research interests lie in developing rich representation learning techniques for single-cell RNA sequencing data, aimed at reducing the time required for lab experiments. Simmi is also involved in optimizing lineage reconstruction methods, ensuring that computational models can accurately trace cellular lineage dynamics.

She joins the institute after her role as a Machine Learning Engineer II at Moderna, where she worked on the ML Infrastructure team. Simmi also developed tools that integrated LLMs into various workflows, significantly increasing the performance and automating the evaluation systems used in production.

Before joining Moderna, Simmi worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon on the Packaging Innovation team. There, she optimized the Packaging Decision Engine (PDE), which determined the most efficient packaging for a wide range of products, demonstrating her ability to apply machine learning techniques to high-impact, real-world problems.

Simmi holds a Master of Science in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on machine learning, computer vision, and advanced machine perception. During her studies, she contributed to research on multimodal question answering under the guidance of Chris Callison-Burch, working on cutting-edge frameworks that merged various data modalities for AI applications.

Earlier in her career, Simmi contributed to healthcare-focused deep learning frameworks as a Deep Learning Developer at Predible Health, and as a Research Engineer at IIIT Delhi, where she published research on cancer classification. She has also been involved with the open-source community through her work during the Google Summer of Code, contributing to high-performance computer vision libraries.

Outside of work, Simmi enjoys photography and the outdoors, passions she cultivated during her time as a photojournalist for the Daily Penn.