LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narek-dshkhunyan/
Born In: Gyumri, Armenia
Current Job: Computational Biologist, 10X Genomics
Bio:
Narek was born in Gyumri, Armenia, and attended high school in Yerevan. At an early age, he fell in love with the sciences and won numerous medals at national and international chemistry olympiads. After high school, Narek moved to Boston to enroll at MIT, where he double majored in Computer Science and Biology and Neuroscience, and subsequently also earned a master’s degree in Computer Science and Biology. While at MIT, he was the secretary of the MIT Armenian Society, playing an active role in the local Armenian community; one of his proudest moments was leading the creation of the MIT Global Teaching Labs in Armenia, a program that every summer sent a few students from MIT to Armenia to teach local high school students all over the country.
After graduating from MIT, Narek moved to Silicon Valley to join a young biotech unicorn called 10x Genomics as a Computational Biologist. There, he develops new machine learning techniques to analyze genomic and transcriptomic data. Some of the products he’s helped develop, such as the groundbreaking platform to quantify antibodies on the surfaces of cell membranes, are now actively used to better understand bodily response to the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus.