Rachit Kumar

Ph.D., Genomics and Computational Biology (March 2025)
M.D., Perelman School of Medicine (expected May 2027)

I am an MD-PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania currently completing my final year of medical school at the Perelman School of Medicine, with an expected graduation date of May 2027. I currently work with multiple faculty at Penn, including Theodore Drivas, Joseph Romano, and Anurag Verma.

During my PhD which I defended in March 2025, I was advised by Dr. Marylyn Ritchie in the Ritchie Lab, and my dissertation research involved making use of novel (especially graph and network) representations of biomedical data for a variety of downstream tasks, including determining Alzheimer’s disease risk and predicting protein-drug binding.

My current research interests involve what I view as multiple important components of precision medicine: identifying mutations that contribute to disease in populations; determining the specific contributing mutations to disease in individual patients; and exploring better ways to target those mutations by finding novel ways to represent proteins and small molecules for drug discovery.

To this end, I am currently working on a variety of projects including: leveraging GPUs and high-performance computing for genetics and genomics data analysis; assessing existing resources for personalized care in clinical genetics; and exploring better ways to represent proteins and small molecules for drug discovery, with a particular interest in protein residue graphs and atomistic molecular graphs. You can find a list of my most recent publications here.

Beyond my time in the clinic and in the lab, I am involved in leadership at Penn and beyond, including serving as City Committeeperson for Philadelphia’s 27th Ward. I also enjoy a variety of hobbies, including trying out new foods, playing video games, and running.