Ramith Hettiarachchi
PhD Student, CMU-Pitt Joint Program in Computational Biology
Website: ramith.fyi
Email: ramith@cmu.edu
Hey! I’m a third year PhD student in the CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, advised by Prof. Lei Li.
Previously at Harvard and MIT, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in computational biology and imaging research under the guidance of Prof. Dushan Wadduwage and Prof. Sergey Ovchinnikov.
I’m interested in developing algorithms and advancing machine learning to learn representations in biology that lead towards drug discovery.
I started this blog when I was learning signals and systems (EN1060) to convey ideas through visualizations. Over the years, it has gone through lots of changes. Occasionally I record piano & vocal covers 🎶🎹. You can find them here.
Experience
- 2025 Jun–2025 Aug: Machine Learning Intern, NEC Labs America
- 2024 Jan–2024 Jul: Visiting Scientist, MIT
- 2022 Jul–2024 Jul: Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Harvard University
Education
- PhD in Computational Biology: CMU-Pitt PhD Program in Computational Biology - 2029 May (expected).
- BSc in Electronic Engineering: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
Featured writing
Clustering pockets in PLINDER
Interaction-based clustering and a gotcha in PLINDER 2024-06/v2.
Differentiable evolutionary trees
Our ICML workshop paper, with the paper, poster, code, and related explanation.
Lion Optimizer
An optimizer discovered through evolutionary search.
Inside ESM-2
Evolutionary-scale prediction of protein structure.
An open science journey
Building multilingual AI for Sinhala through a global community effort.
The road to Adam
A visual introduction to Adam and the ideas behind it.
News
- Organizing the GenBio 2026 workshop in Seoul
- Started work as a ML Research Intern at NEC Labs America
- Attended the MLDD Summer School & Molecular Machine Learning Conference @ MILA 🇨🇦 (Our team won the Kinase Selectivity Prediction Challenge 🎉)
- Aya Dataset (open-access multilingual instruction dataset) accepted to ACL 2024! 🎉
- Our paper at ICML 2023 workshops
Earlier news
- [Invited Talk] - Northeast Symposium on Biomedical Optics
- [Invited talk] - Nano-SymBioSys workshop at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway 🇳🇴
- Selected to Princeton Pathways to Graduate School Program
- 📄 Paper accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
- Started work as a Post Baccalaureate Fellow at Harvard
- 📄 Internship project research paper accepted to ICCAR 2022
- 🏅 Our team - , became the Champions of the IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2021 🎉
- Our team got qualified for the final round of IEEE SP Cup to be held at ICASSP 2021
- 📄 First Author Paper Accepted to ISCAS 2021
- Volunteered for the Sustainable Education Foundation as an Assistant Program Manager of the ScholarX 2021 program
- First Runner-up in the 2020 CASS COVID-19 Student Design Competition
- 🏅 Our team, became 48th in the world, 1st in 🇱🇰 in IEEEXtreme 13.0 Competition