Past year “High”lights

The past few months, I’ve had so much content to share, and I could have easily devoted some time to write, but never took the time to “pull” that content from my head and “push” it to my blog.

Before I get to what kept me busy, let me begin by posting some Holi-Night pictures 😀 I’ve successfully completed two stage performances! The credit goes to Sahil and Neha, for pushing me to do so, during Diwali, last year 🙂

 

Having taken that short detour, if you’ve not noticed already, I’ve spent the last few months writing a lot of code; “pulling” it and “pushing” it to Git repositories. Code required for my courses, my research and my startup.

Yes, I’ve started up! We are “Whisker“, a startup that crowd-sources dog-sitting/boarding and walking services. For those who need more context, let me elaborate this. In the US, most dog-owners face the menace of finding an appropriate dog-sitter in their neighborhood, while they’re out-of-town. We solve this problem, by building a community of dog-owners that help each other when sitting services are requested. TL;DR, we are => “Airbnb for dogs”.  We’ve recently been recognized by CMU as a budding-startup, and got to be a part of the CMU NSF-I-Corps Spring-2016 cohort.

Apart from my startup, I’ve been working in parallel on my research at Dr. Ge Yang’s Lab. Currently, I’m working on a very fascinating problem. For completeness, I’m going to provide some background as well.

We know, as a matter of fact, that cells communicate. They could “speak” to each other via contact (exchange of elements), or could pursue long-range talk(s) by using chemical messenger molecules. This piece of information is well known in most cells, with the neurons being extremely well studied for this phenomena. We (@Ge’s Lab) hypothesize that there could be a network (communication) of organelles within a cell. To prove/disprove this hypothesis, I’ve designed a set of experiments for the summer. Apart from performing experiments, my work involves a lot of exciting math and statistics to model the existence of this network.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

No-play is a No-No for me. I swim almost every day, and play squash whenever I don’t get to the pool. Apart from working out, the last 2 weekends have been eventful, ie party-intensive. I’ve been on a cruise, danced on diwali & holi nights, and chilled out with friends in disco-bars more than once! 😉

Cruise Pictures

The “Holy” Holi Pictures

With this, I end this post.

I shall write more, this summer! Stay tuned 😀