Aastha Shah

Bioinformatics graduate with practical training in computational approaches using R and Linux. Experienced in analysing large-scale omics datasets and driving engagement in technical communities. Adept at managing projects and producing technical content to support scientific communication.

Title: Finding potential targets in drug resistant lung cancer samples utilising bulk RNA-seq pipeline.

• Developed a bioinformatics pipeline to analyse 5 drug-resistant lung cancer RNA-seq datasets from GEO using R & Linux command line.
• Implemented quality control workflows using FastQC/MultiQC and performed genome alignment with STAR aligner on HPC systems, achieving >60% unique mapping rates across both single-end and paired-end datasets covering 3 drug resistance mechanisms & 2 lung cancer types.
• Developed visualisation and statistical analysis frameworks and database architecture for reproducible research in SQLite, with future applications in drug target discovery.
• Documented the research by performing systematic literature review and presented it as thesis.

• PGT Faculty & School Representative, Queens University Belfast - Elected to represent the Postgraduate Taught students for the development of respective schools & courses to the Dean & Faculty.
• Team Lead, ETHMumbai - Planned & Managed the 2nd largest Ethereum hackathon in India for 200+ hackers (international) & 30+ winning projects.
• Team Member, Hack This Fall - Managed a hackathon over 3 days with 500+ hackers from around the country.

Title: Towards Federated Learning Across Biobanks: PrototypeSoftware from the 2026 Carnegie MellonUniversity–NVIDIA Hackathon

- Contributed to the RAIDers: Federated Rare Disease Subtyping project as a part of the Carnegie Mellon University-NVIDIA Federated Learning Hackathon for Biomedical Applications.