Salil Bhate
Since January 2026, I am a Research Leader at Isomorphic Labs.
I develop computational frameworks to understand from first-principles how biological information is translated across scales, systems and contexts:
- Tissue Schematics and Cellular Neighborhoods cast the assembly of cells into tissues as a formal language,
- Phenotype Sequence Alignment demonstrates that compositional structure of phenotypes can be used as a relational constraint to discover genetic associations without genotype-phenotype covariation, by unsupervised translation with the reference genome sequence,
- Multi-context principal component analysis generalizes PCA with tensor decomposition to identify axes of variation leveraging how they are combined across subsets of contexts.
Previously, I was a Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broad Institute. I obtained my PhD (with thesis titled "Towards semantic representations of tissue organization from high-parameter imaging") in Bioengineering at Stanford University, where my advisor was Garry Nolan. This talk at the Broad's Models, Inference and Algorithms initiative is about that work.
Before Stanford, I did my undergraduate/master's in pure math(s) at the University of Cambridge, and some synthetic biology.
Here is my google scholar profile.