The Indian native, who was recently hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection (ITI) and Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) in Stanford University’s School of Medicine, earned his master’s and doctorate from Wayne State in 2006. He made his mark in the research world early in his graduate career. 

“I initially enrolled at Wayne State because it was a great research university in the heart of a major city,” he says. “Once I got there, I worked with Professor Sorin Draghici, who had just shifted the focus of his research efforts from neural networks to bioinformatics. It was a very new research discipline at the time, and Draghici was the only one at WSU who was pursuing it.”

Working with Draghici and his team in the Intelligent Systems and Bioinformatics Laboratory (ISBL), Khatri’s research efforts focused on developing novel methods and tools for analysis of data generated using high-throughput technologies and translating them into biological knowledge.

Khatri developed a tool called Onto-Express, which identified "biological themes" — pathways in a given list of genes. “This was tremendously successful because pathways reduced the dimensionality from thousands of genes to a few tens of pathways, and allowed the researchers to generate specific hypotheses,” he says.

Following the success of Onto-Express, Khatri led the creation of Onto-Tools in the ISBL, an open-access suite of bioinformatics tools for analysis of high-throughput data. By the time he finished his Ph.D. in 2006, he had more than 15 peer-reviewed journal publications to his name and more than 10,000 registered Onto-Tools suite users worldwide.

Despite offers from other universities and traditional advice highlighting the benefits of doing post-doc work at a different institution from where one receives a doctorate degree, Khatri opted to remain at Wayne State.

“I decided to stay at WSU because of the many opportunities for high-impact research. The research community heavily cited my work, and I was extremely productive at WSU. We had a very collaborative environment in the ISBL, where everyone was working toward making the Onto-Tools as useful as possible to the community.”

When he left Wayne State in 2008 to become a research associate at Stanford, Khatri had published 23 papers with more than 2,200 citations — six of which had more than 100 citations each.

According to Khatri, who started in his assistant professor role at Stanford on April 1, his success is thanks to Wayne State’s collaborative culture and outstanding faculty members. 

“The scientist I am today was born at WSU. WSU is my home. It is where I learned to challenge myself, think critically and ask novel questions. I learned so much from the faculty in the Department of Computer Science, especially from my mentor — and my ‘academic father’ — Draghici. He pushed me really hard to do the best possible job I could, and always challenged me.

“I really am thankful the WSU faculty members all looked out for me. I am where I am due to their support and advice.”

Wayne State University is a premier urban research institution offering more than 370 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 29,000 students. For more information about engineering at Wayne State University, visit engineering.wayne.edu.