Syosset Student Presents Research At Prestigious Conferences

SYOSSET, NY — Syosset High School student Rohan Ghotra has been chosen to present his research on genomics at three conferences taking place this year.

Ghotra, a senior enrolled in the high school’s Advanced Research Program and one of Syosset’s National Merit Semifinalists, has been performing research with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Partners for the Future Program. Under the advisement of Dr. Peter Koo, Ghotra's research has been centered on the field of genomics, the branch of molecular biology that studies the structure, function, evolution and mapping of genes.

In addition to submitting his research for the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search competition, Ghotra has been selected to present his research at top conferences in the country. He presented his paper Designing Interpretable Convolution-Based Hybrid Networks for Genomics at the virtual International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in July. ICML subsequently published the paper after the conference.

He also presented his research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Genome Informatics Conference the first week of November and was asked to present his paper at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), AI for Science: Mind the Gaps, taking place December 6-14.

“The ICML and NeurIPS conferences are two of the top conferences in the field of machine learning,” said Syosset High School Research Facilitator Veronica Ade. “I am extremely impressed and proud of the research Rohan is completing.”