Director of Bioinformatics
Immunexpress Inc.
Dr. Navalkar's prior training is in infectious disease diagnostics, pathology and bioinformatics with about 19 years of experience. Her PhD is in Biological Design with a specialization in infectious disease diagnostics, bioinformatics and proteomics from Arizona State University (ASU) in 2014. Prior to that her masters is in Computational Biosciences from ASU. She majored in Microbiology during her Bachelor of Science degree at University of Mumbai and completed her specialization in pathology during her post-graduate diploma in medical lab technology. She also has two diplomas in web-centric computing and IT. Her published research is in bioinformatics, proteomics, genomics and infectious disease diagnostics. She is proficient at deploying molecular diagnostics within the medical realm.
Prior to working at Immunexpress as Director of Bioinformatics, she worked at University of Washington as part of the genomics sequencing group at the center for innate immunity and immune disease (CIIID) as a Senior Computational Specialist. Her post-doctoral training was at the Institute for Systems Biology in Dr. Leroy Hood's Lab where she worked with P&G to develop probabilistic boolean models from gene expression data. She also worked on an NSF funded grant to help identify host response based gene expression markers of Ebola exposure. Her work at ASU involved developing the Immunosignatures peptide microarray technology which received funding from DTRA in excess of 30 million dollars. The technology was later developed at a company HealthTell (>90 million in funding) and continues to be developed at another company Calviri in Arizona. During her PhD dissertation, Dr. Navalkar also developed a sensitive blood test for Valley fever to enable early detection of disease surpassing existing gold standard assays in performance. Prior to working at ASU, she worked at a Harvard Medical International affiliate hospital in India, Wockhardt for a couple years in Pathology.