Sandra Aravind Areekal

Sandra Aravind Areekal

Hey there, I am a passionate health researcher with a robust quantitative background. I am currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, exploring the trajectories of cardiovascular frailty in old age to inform healthy aging and improve the quality of life of older adults.

I earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at IISER Pune, under the mentorship of Dr Pranay Goel. During my doctoral studies, I delved into the intricate relationship between metabolism and height in Indian children and adolescents. My thesis, titled “Modelling Growth Processes in Indian Children and Adolescents,” not only explores the nuances of these developmental aspects but also employs advanced quantitative methodologies to derive meaningful insights.

Please see my published works here: ORCID

I enjoy the R language environment and love working with Tidyverse, RMarkdown, Blogdown, Shiny etc. I also work with specific R packages related to longitudinal data analysis (non-linear mixed effects models like SITAR) and generalised regression methods (GAMLSS) for my research.

Check out our easy-to-use web app, growHT, to monitor height growth in Indian children aged 5 to 18 years. Read more about this work here.

See my resumé.

Interests
  • Longitudinal Studies
  • Healthy Ageing
  • Growth curves
  • Medical Statistics
  • Mathematical Modelling
  • Data Science
  • Electronic Health Records
Education
  • PhD in Biology, 2017 - 2023

    Department of Biology, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune

  • Integrated BS-MS, 2012 - 2017

    Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Computational Epidemiologist
AI and Robotics PARK at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India
Oct 2023 – Mar 2024
Consultant on mathematical modelling of Infectious diseases.
 
 
 
 
 
Volunteer - Workshop on Introduction to Machine Learning
IISER Pune
Jul 2019 – Jul 2019
Workshop on introduction to machine learning focused on applications in biology for undergraduate teachers conducted by the Centre of Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education (CoESME), IISER Pune
 
 
 
 
 
Teaching Assistant - Data science
IISER Pune
Jan 2019 – Apr 2019
Taught undergraduates and first year PhD students
 
 
 
 
 
Teaching Assistant - Biostatistics
IISER Pune
Aug 2018 – Nov 2019
Taught undergraduates and first year PhD students
 
 
 
 
 
MS Thesis
Aug 2016 – Apr 2017 IISER Thiruvananthapuram
Developing a Graphical User Interface for the analysis of meiotic recombination patterns from whole-genome sequence data.
 
 
 
 
 
Internship - Next-Gen Sequence Analysis
Advisor - Dr. Nishant KT
May 2016 – Jul 2016 IISER Thiruvananthapuram
Crossover analysis and CHIP-seq analysis
 
 
 
 
 
Internship - Plant Functional Traits - specific leaf area
Advisor - Dr. Mahesh Sankaran
May 2015 – Jul 2015 National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore
 
 
 
 
 
Internship - Introduction to Computational Biology and Phylogenetic analysis
Advisor - Dr. Achuthsankar S
May 2014 – Jul 2014 Department of Bioinformatics, University of Kerala

Skills

MATLAB
Overleaf

Contact

  • Department of Clinical and Biomedical Sciences, University of Exeter, St Luke's Campus, Exeter EX1 2LU
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