Dr. Chirag Jain
Graduates of Last Decade (GOLD) Award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in Academics and Research
Award Year: 2024 | Degree Year: 2014
Dr Chirag Jain received his B.Tech. Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi in 2014. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech in 2019. Subsequently, he pursued postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, USA, in 2019-20. Since October 2020, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
Prof. Jain has made significant research contributions in computational biology, specifically for high-throughput genome sequencing data analysis. His research focuses on designing algorithms with theoretical guarantees to make the analysis of DNA sequences cheaper, faster, and more accurate for biomedical applications. He has also contributed to national and international projects, including the first complete reconstruction of a human genome sequence (led by NHGRI) and the GenomeIndia project (led by CBR).
Prof. Jain's most impactful publication, “High throughput ANI analysis of 90K prokaryotic genomes reveals clear species boundaries”, proposed a novel algorithm to estimate evolutionary distances among microbial genomes. Due to its much faster speed and acceptable accuracy, this was the first method to enable all-to-all pairwise distance comparisons among all publicly available 90,000 microbial genomes. The analysis highlighted the extent to which microbes form discrete clusters (species), which has been an open question in microbiology. This paper has received over 3000 citations.
Prof. Jain is the recipient of several honors, including the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellowship (2024), NIH Director’s Award (2022), and NERSC High Performance Computing Achievement Award (2022). After joining IISc, he obtained external funding as a Principal Investigator from India Alliance, DST, and SERB. He currently supervises PhD/MTech students and teaches graduate-level algorithms courses at IISc.
In honouring Dr. Chirag Jain, IIT Delhi recognizes his contributions to Academics and Research. Through his achievements, Dr. Jain has brought glory to the name of the Institute.
