Basudev Chaudhuri

Advisor at Allen Institute

After growing up between England and India, Basudev Chaudhuri came to the United States in 1991 for his undergraduate education. He earned a BA from Colgate University, dual majoring in Physics and Mathematics. In 1995 he headed to Cornell University to eventually earn his Ph.D. in Theoretical Solid State Physics. There he worked on quantum Monte Carlo studies of vacancies in solid 4He with Geoffrey Chester. He also worked on a dynamical model for resonant charge transfer in atom-metal scattering with Brad Marston from Brown University, in collaboration with Barbara Cooper’s lab at Cornell. With much of his time spent on writing simulations to run on the parallel clusters at Cornell, he fell in love with software development and began to understand the difference between programming and software engineering.

While finishing his thesis he started working as his first employee at Gene Network Sciences, now GNS Healthcare. He enjoyed wearing multiple hats – on one hand developing the VisualCell/DigitalCell platform for in-silico biology to build predictive models, on the other setting up the IT and network infrastructure. GNS was followed by a short stint at Autodesk to get a sense of commercial software development.

He joined Blue Origin in 2007 to be part of a commercial spaceflight endeavor. He developed software to author and visualize complex systems automation, as well as a framework for distributed computational workflows spanning the local machines and the AWS cloud, with the ability to dynamically provision parallel clusters as needed. He also led a small team to develop a scalable geographically distributed micro-services-based time series data management system.

After 9 years at Blue Origin, Basudev joined the Allen Institute for Cell Sciences in 2016 as the Director of Software Engineering overseeing the software development and information technology aspects of the Institute. He built a team of software engineers and IT professionals to establish the infrastructure for managing and processing the large amounts of data generated by the 3D live cell imaging at the Institute.

He joined Resolution Bioscience in 2020 as the Sr. Director of Software Engineering. He is working with multiple software and IT teams to develop a modern platform for liquid biopsies using next-generation sequencing.