Congratulations to our Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Hirak Sarkar on joining Vanderbilt University as an Assistant Professor in the College of Connected Computing and the Center for Computational Systems Biology! Before heading to Nashville, Hirak was a Ludwig Scholar and Postdoctoral fellow in the Kang and Raphael labs. In our lab he played a critical role in leading our labs computational work mostly notably in our genomics work, including leading the effort on analyzing the spatial transcriptomics aims of the Kang Lab's recent paper in Cell entitled “Tumors hijack macrophages for iron supply to promote bone metastasis and anemia”. Hirak now will lead a group focusing on developing computational models for single-cell genomics and spatial transcriptomics where he will work to uncover the principles of tissue organization and disease microenvironments.

Congratulations, Hirak — we can't wait to see what you build!