Nish Aravamudan

Hi all, I'm Nish. I'm a part-time Masters student in Computer Science at Portland State University and a full-time employee at IBM. I live and work in Portland, OR.

My research interests are in computational neuroscience (particularly neuropathology). My father suffers from bipolar disorder and I hope one day to be doing research in depressive disorders. I would like to eventually find a career path that allowed me to directly apply my research to problems that immediately affect people (rather than enabling the tools to do so). My undergraduate and (so far) graduate backgrounds are in Computer Science and Philosophy (of Science and the Mind). I have taken a number of courses in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Theory of Computation. However, I have not done a huge amount of research and I am hoping CSSS will help get my brain going on an eventual thesis topic. I am also really looking forward to meeting many of my future peer researchers in this space and hearing about their interests.

As far as a pie in the sky idea, I'm fascinated by the neurological relations (if there are any) between (ecstatic?) religious experiences and the notion of infinity, infinite series (and recurrence, self-reference, etc). Really anything in the space of the "Neuroscience of Religion" ... there was some research recently on Buddhist monks able to heat their bodies in extremely cold environments and survive conditions that should be unsurvivable, as well as other research on brain patterns in meditation.

I'm a Linux kernel hacker in IBM's Linux Technology Center, focusing on hugepage-related issues, so I kind of live in two very separate worlds. But given this exposure, I often can find free and open source alternatives to proprietary applications for use in research. I code for a living, so implementing ideas comes very quickly to me and I have no troubles, usually, learning a new language for a new project.

In my free time, I play ultimate frisbee quite a bit (I'll be missing some of the best weather for it in Portland while at CSSS :) and tease my two dogs and cat. I also enjoy playing strategy board games (Settlers of Catan, Twilight Imperium, Game of Thrones, etc), reading and cooking vegetarian food.

Contact Info:

Cell: 317-332-7350 E-mail: nish.aravamudan <at> gmail.com