Ms. Sharvari Narendra’s journey towards the field of Bioinformatics started with a Master’s degree in Microbiology from India, followed by a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics from Northeastern University, Boston in the U.S.

During her Master’s in Bioinformatics, she interned at the McLean Hospital, where she studied the effect of alcohol use disorder on genes and pathways in the amygdala region of the brain of female mice. This research led to her first author publication in the Nature journal ‘Translational Psychiatry’. Post graduation, she was a part of a research project that studied how genes implicated in COVID-19 were regulated in different lung cell types across age (from newborns to adults) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The manuscript that has been published on this research in eLife has over 150 citations. She joined BatchX (a bioinformatics start-up) as a Bioinformatics Software Engineer post-UCSD, wherein she developed a 16S pipeline from scratch. This pipeline reduced the analysis bottleneck by 600% and was used by >40% of BatchX clients, helping them in their research.

It was when she started working at the University of Virginia (UVA) as a Bioinformatics Analyst that she found her niche in microbial data analysis and antimicrobial resistance surveillance (with public health impact). She is a part of many ongoing projects, one of the most impactful being the “Ring Trial”. She was very instrumental in helping create, analyze end-to-end and complete the very first “Ring Trial” in the United States, under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Pathogen Genomics Centers of Excellence Network (PGCoE) grant.

This “Ring Trial” aimed to understand how public health laboratories investigate hospital-mediated antimicrobial resistance outbreaks. She was instrumental in identifying significant gaps in bioinformatics analysis, which helped inform best practices. This project led her to win the first prize at the University of Virginia Research Computing Exhibition 2024 in the “Biological Sciences” category. The project was also highlighted in the CDC PGCoE network’s internal and external newsletter, and she presented it at the 2024 American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Conference on Rapid Applied Microbial Next-Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatic Pipelines (ASM NGS) as a poster. She is currently involved in creating a second iteration of the “Ring Trial”.

Outside of work, she was invited as a guest speaker to “The Bioinformatics Lab” podcast to share her career journey in Bioinformatics. Given her expertise in Bioinformatics, she had been invited to serve as a judge at the Greater San Diego Science & Engineering Fair (GSDSEF) as well as serve as a peer reviewer for various manuscripts in many prestigious journals such as “Cancer Cell International”, “PLOS ONE”, “Plant Stress”, “STAR Protocols”. She is currently serving as a mentor in the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Future Leaders Mentorship Fellowship (FLMF) Program.

She is also a member of many well-known and established organizations such as American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE), the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists’s (AOAC) Stakeholder Program on Agent Detection Assays (SPADA) Metagenomics Working Group and the Open Science Data Repository’s (OSDR) ‘Microbes’ Analysis Working Group (AWG).

Aside from Bioinformatics, she is passionate about being a part of social organizations that make a difference in the world with science and research. To that end, she is serving as a member and a secretary of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Subcommittee on the Status of Women in Microbiology (SSWiM). She has also been crucial in writing two books on cancer: “Genetic Testing: A Game-Changer In Breast Cancer Management, by Laleh Busheri (2023)” and “Triumph Over Breast Cancer: Odysseys Of Phenomenal Women, by Laleh Busheri (2018)”, and was a co-editor of the blog “Science for Society” published in 2019