Arjun Krishnan is an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. His research sits at the intersection of machine learning (ML), biomedical data science and complex disease mechanisms with a focus on developing ML/AI-powered computational methods and tools that help researchers extract new knowledge from the rapidly growing collection of publicly available biological and clinical data.

One of key goals of the Krishnan lab is understanding the molecular, functional and cellular basis of complex diseases and traits. The lab develops and applies network-based ML approaches that integrate large-scale genomic, transcriptomic, and other molecular data to identify genes, pathways and cell types underlying diseases — including autism spectrum disorder and other neurodevelopmental conditions — and to generate testable hypotheses about biological mechanisms in humans and model organisms.

A second direction of the Krishnan lab focuses on making public biomedical data more discoverable and reusable. Vast quantities of datasets are deposited in public repositories every year yet are rarely revisited after initial publication, in large part because the metadata describing them is fragmented, inconsistently written and unstandardized. The Krishnan lab develops ML and NLP methods (including those using large language models) that extract meaningful biological signals from unstructured metadata, infer missing annotations and connect datasets across research domains and data types, enabling researchers to find relevant data and identify integration opportunities that would be impossible to discover manually.

In 2023, Krishnan received the NIH DataWorks! Prize: Significant Achievement Award for Data Reuse in recognition of his team’s contributions to advancing the biomedical community’s ability to leverage public data.