Neha Talluri’s childhood ambitions were shaped by her grandparents, who ran a free clinic in India. Their example drew her to medicine as a form of service, and medical school was always Talluri’s goal — until her senior year in high school.
By then, the luster of being a doctor had dimmed.
“Because I am a very creative person, I wanted a career where I could use those skills,” she says.
Her father, a computer engineer and a University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate, had always encouraged her to look into computer science as a career. “My brother and I were like, ‘We’re never going to do stuff like that,’” she recalls.
But then her brother randomly suggested the possibility of computational biology, an amalgam of the two fields. Talluri checked out a YouTube video about the field and was immediately sold on the idea. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing.”
When COVID struck at the end of her senior year, she took a coding class at the local technical school to prepare for her college studies. It was a tough course that often left her frustrated.
“I cried a lot,” Talluri says. “Thankfully my dad was there. I probably wouldn’t have made it through computer science without him. He probably doesn’t know that, but his guidance literally saved me.”
Her father’s reassuring voice was also influential as she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at UW–Madison. “It was a very difficult thing until my junior year, then everything clicked,” she says.
In Talluri’s sophomore year, she was chosen for a research mentorship through the Wisconsin Science and Computing Emerging Research Star (WISCERS) program, and began working in the lab of Tony Gitter, a Morgridge investigator.
Today as a doctoral candidate, she is still part of Gitter’s team as a graduate research assistant.
Gitter’s lab develops new computational methods and works with collaborators to apply them to study specific conditions and diseases, especially viral infection and cancer. It also uses machine learning to guide high-throughput biological experiments for drug discovery and protein engineering.
“A lot of computational biology work doesn’t seem to get experimentally validated. Most people don’t have collaborators to do that or have the time, but here we do. I can really see it being validated.” Neha Talluri
Talluri’s current work focuses on pathway reconstruction — figuring out not just what proteins and molecules are active in a diseased cell, but how they interact with one another to form signaling pathways.
She works on software that allows researchers to run and compare dozens of competing algorithms with wrestling incompatible formats or fussy dependencies. It’s unglamorous, foundational work. At Morgridge, she finds it is also fulfilling because of the collaborative nature of the work, helping researchers from around campus solve biological problems.
“A lot of computational biology work doesn’t seem to get experimentally validated,” Talluri says. “Most people don’t have collaborators to do that or have the time, but here we do. I can really see it being validated.”
The research, Talluri says, fulfills her creative needs.
“I don’t think I’m a naturally artistic person, but I need to create something,” she says. “My PhD studies allow me to do that, even though that’s a really difficult choice to make. It’s really grueling. You could end up in a really bad situation where nothing comes from it. But you’re testing yourself in a way that most people don’t have to get tested.”
She also tested herself recently when she took part in SciProv, a live local improv show put on by Amalgam that pairs short, digestible presentations from researchers with on-the-fly improv comedy.
“There were probably 80 people there, the biggest group I’ve ever spoken to,” she says. “They do a great job of integrating your work into their comedy. It was fun to see what they picked up from my presentation.”
Entering her second year of doctoral studies, Talluri also believes that courage is a big part of succeeding in graduate school.
“People are scared to be lost. I’m scared to be lost,” she says. “When you’re doing a PhD, it doesn’t go away. But you have to have confidence that you’ll find the answer out slowly. Just knowing that you will figure it out is good advice to hear.”
Rising Sparks: Early Career Stars
Rising Sparks is a monthly profile series exploring the personal inspirations and professional goals of early-career scientists at the Morgridge Institute.