Akshaya Ramesh (MED’19)

As a PHD student in microbiology professor Tom Kepler’s lab on the Medical Campus, Akshaya Ramesh (MED’19) is helping harness the power of supercomputing, along with highly efficient algorithms, to find a vaccine for HIV. She’s part of a team that is whole-genome sequencing rhesus macaques, the monkey which shares 93% of its DNA with humans. The aim is to better comprehend the primate’s immune system and antibody responses and then develop a reference database for scientists. But this work requires more than a laptop. There are around 10 million sequences that represent the entire genome. “The volume of information we’re talking about here is a terabyte, 1 trillion bytes. It takes 15 days to run one trial. Our lab has two computers. We simply wouldn’t be able to do this vital research without this technology.”