Rate My Professor Shyam Prabhakar

Shyam Prabhakar is Associate Director of Spatial and Single Cell Systems and Senior Group Leader of the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Data Analytics at the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore. He obtained a B.Tech in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University, where he was the sole recipient of the 2001 American Physical Society PhD thesis award for Beam Physics. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining the Genome Institute of Singapore as an independent investigator.

Prabhakar’s research focuses on transcriptional regulation, disease mechanisms, therapeutics, diagnostics, omics technologies and algorithm development. His laboratory employs single-cell RNA-seq, cohort-scale histone ChIP-seq and other high-throughput assays alongside computational methods to investigate conditions including autism spectrum disorder, colorectal cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia and host responses to infection. Major contributions include the first single-cell transcriptomic analysis of colorectal tumors, the first histone acetylome-wide association study of autism spectrum disorder, the first large-scale study of variants altering histone acetylation in disease susceptibility and the first unified signal-processing method for peak detection in whole-genome profiling data. He leads or co-leads initiatives such as the Asian Immune Diversity Atlas, SCISSOR spatial omics programme and genome analytics for Singapore’s National Precision Medicine Program, and serves as coordinator of Human Cell Atlas-Asia.