Hi, I’m Ishaan. I’m a doctoral student in Engineering at the University of Oxford: my project is in rapidly identifying antibiotic resistance using superresolution microscopy1. What that means:

We cannot normally image small cellular structures with light because of its diffraction limit. By exciting certain structures in nonlinear ways across space and time and using computational techniques, we can reconstruct what these structures must look like at a resolution limit higher than that imposed by light.

My research focuses on using these ‘super-resolution’ techniques to rapidly identify antibiotic resistance in certain types of bacteria. Current tests for resistance are expensive and can take several days to return only a very simplistic readout of pathogen type and resistance status, during which time patients are given broad-spectrum antibiotics which (i) drive antimicrobial resistance and (ii) have no robust guarantee of action against the specific bacteria present.

These techniques have the potential to massively cut down the time taken in identifying pathogenic bacteria, resolving what antimicrobials they are resistant to, and probing their mechanisms of resistance.

I also love programming, squash, reading, gardening, and receiving emails from people like you!

I use this domain for hosting several of my personal projects; apart from the links around the page, there isn’t much to see here (…unless you know where to look 🙂)

  1. My master’s research project was entitled High-throughput analysis of cellular morphology and spatial biology using a deep learning approach, aka. “what’s the best way to quantify the shape and innards of a cell?” ↩︎