This is one in a series of stories about alumni of the Nexus Scholars Program.
Aditya Syam ’25
CS, Mathematics
Cohort: Summer 2024
Though he had some prior experience in research coming into the program, it wasn’t until he entered the Nexus Scholars Program in 2024 that Aditya Syam ‘25 formally immersed himself into a long-term research project.
While working with Professor April Wei in the department of computational biology, Syam developed a phenotype simulator based on graphical representations of genomic data in an effort to create faster simulations of large-scale data. Though he entered with a strong background in computer science and mathematics, genetics was largely unfamiliar territory.
“It initially seemed like a lot of jargon. The first week or two, a lot of the words were unfamiliar to me” he recalls “I needed to really understand because it wasn’t just the field, but also because I was building off what the lab had previously built.”
One of the most rewarding moments of the summer came when Syam and his lab members tested their phenotype simulator against other existing tools. Although they were confident that their simulator would surpass the benchmark, they were uncertain by how much. “When we actually ran the time trials, we had a significant margin that was better than whatever the fastest at the time was." After seeing these results firsthand, Syam was amazed by the impact of the work that he had completed throughout the course of the summer: “I was actually able to build this and I wanted to keep doing this further and see this through to the end.”
Syam continued working with the lab long after the Nexus Scholars Program concluded, eventually contributing to the project’s recent publication in the Journal of Bioinformatics Advances. He also had the opportunity to represent the Wei lab at a computational biology conference during his senior year, where he was one of the only undergraduates presenting his research among graduate students and doctoral researchers.
Today, Syam works as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs. Despite ultimately pursuing a career outside of computational genetics, he emphasizes that he is “still building solutions, solving problems [and] making things faster, which is exactly what I was doing when I was researching.” Syam describes Nexus as “one of my capstone experiences at college, if not the capstone experience”, highlighting how the program taught him to approach problems with an open mind, which still influences his work now.
Having seen his own Nexus project grow beyond the ten weeks of the program, Syam encourages current Nexus Scholars to immerse themselves fully in their research throughout the program. “You’re going to get back as much as you give in to it,” he explained. “You never know what this could eventually turn into, so just give as much as you can into it.”
