Rahul Sarpeshkar

Dartmouth

Talk Title: Rapid and Rational Covid-19 Drug-Cocktail Discovery

Rahul Sarpeshkar, a pioneer in synthetic and systems biology and the Thomas E. Kurtz Professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth will describe his research on drug cocktail treatments that may be effective in treating COVID-19. Through his research, he has invented analog circuits as well as ‘cytomorphic’ supercomputing electronic chips and prototypes that simulate cellular computation for potentially rapid drug discovery. Sarpeshkar is also working on developing his analog cytomorphic supercomputer to act as a one-of-a-kind smart search engine that could identify potential treatments to all diseases extremely rapidly. He hopes that in a few years, he will be able to identify possible treatments to pandemics within just one day. His talk will go into the use of electronic design tools for rapid drug discovery based on cytomorphic computers.

Bio

Sarpeshkar’s publications have been cited over 11,000 times and his h-index is 53. He holds 44 patents, delivered a TEDx talk on analog supercomputers, and is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. He has authored a leading textbook on analog circuits and bioelectronic systems. Sarpeshkar is also a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Physics, and Molecular and Systems Biology. He heads an interdisciplinary group at Dartmouth that uses analog circuits and analog computation as a universal language for impacting many disciplines. He was formerly a tenured professor at MIT before moving to Dartmouth.