Building for the People in the Waiting Room

Some children remember their first school picnic or their first trip to the beach.

I remember the smell of antiseptic.

From kindergarten through fourth standard, I was a regular at Goa Medical College. Weak immunity meant countless hospital visits, blood tests, scans, and long hours in waiting rooms. My medical file was thicker than most of my school textbooks.

At that age, I didn't understand medicine. I didn't understand diagnostics. I didn't understand why doctors ordered certain tests or how they arrived at answers.

What I did understand was uncertainty.

I saw how illness affected not just patients, but entire families. I watched my parents wait for test results. I watched doctors search for answers. Long before I knew what biotechnology was, I became fascinated by the systems that keep us healthy when they work and what happens when they don't.

Those early experiences quietly shaped me.

As my health improved, curiosity slowly replaced helplessness. I wanted to understand the science behind what I had lived through.

That curiosity eventually grew into a habit of building things.

Learning to Build

In eighth and ninth grade, I became fascinated by scientific questions that were far bigger than my understanding at the time. One of my earliest projects was a concept for a detector to study Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), hypothetical particles proposed as candidates for dark matter.

Looking back, it was probably an absurdly ambitious project for a teenager.

But that project taught me something important: ideas did not have to remain ideas.

The concept eventually earned me recognition as Budding Scientist of Goa and later Budding Scientist of India, but the awards were never the point. The real reward was discovering the joy of taking an abstract question and turning it into something tangible.

After that, I kept looking for problems to solve.

By high school, I became interested in environmental health and began building Aircube, a smart air-quality monitoring system using Arduino-based sensors. Over the next few years, I refined the system repeatedly, improving its accuracy and expanding its capabilities.

Aircube taught me my first lesson in preventive healthcare.

Sometimes the best way to help people is not through treatment. Sometimes it is through information. The right information, delivered at the right time, can help people make better decisions long before a problem becomes a crisis.

That idea stayed with me.

From Environmental Monitoring to Healthcare

When I entered college to study biotechnology, my focus shifted from environmental monitoring to healthcare.

I became increasingly interested in diagnostics because diagnostics sit at the beginning of almost every healthcare journey. Before treatment comes understanding. Before intervention comes identification.

During my undergraduate years, I worked on a project called Swastha, a histopathological image analysis tool for breast cancer detection. The goal was to use computational approaches to assist pathologists in making faster and more accurate assessments.

For the first time, I saw code not simply as a technical skill, but as a clinical tool.

A better algorithm could help a doctor reach an answer sooner.

A faster answer could reduce uncertainty for a patient.

The connection between computation and healthcare suddenly felt very real.

Learning Through Community

Around the same time, I became involved in Goa's startup and innovation ecosystem. I attended Product Hunt meetups, joined Goa's Programmers Group, and served on the Institution's Innovation Council at Dhempe College. Through hackathons, innovation challenges, and countless conversations with builders, founders, and researchers, I learned another important lesson.

Innovation is rarely a solo act.

The best ideas emerge when people from different disciplines challenge one another, contribute different perspectives, and work together toward a common goal.

That realization would become increasingly important as my interests evolved.

Finding Computational Biology

During my Master's in Marine Biotechnology and later at CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography, I found myself drawn toward computational biology.

At first, this seemed like a departure from healthcare.

In reality, it was another step toward understanding complexity.

I worked on marine metagenomics, environmental genomics, microbial genome reconstruction, and large-scale biological data analysis. My days were spent building bioinformatics pipelines, classifying organisms hidden within environmental samples, reconstructing genomes, and trying to understand what biological systems were doing beneath the surface.

The datasets became larger.

The questions became harder.

And I became increasingly fascinated by how much information could be extracted from biological data with the right computational tools.

Along the way, I also explored structural bioinformatics, intrinsically disordered proteins, and phase-separating systems. These areas continue to fascinate me because they resist simple explanations.

Some proteins refuse to fold neatly.

Some biological systems behave unpredictably.

Some of the most important phenomena emerge from apparent disorder.

The deeper I moved into biology, the more I realized that complexity is not a bug in biological systems. It is often the point.

The Thread Connecting It All

Yet throughout all these experiences, from hospital corridors and science fairs to startup communities and genomics pipelines, a common thread remained.

I was always trying to answer the same question.

How do we turn understanding into impact?

Scientific knowledge is valuable.

But knowledge sitting inside a paper changes very little on its own.

A technology becomes meaningful when it reaches people.

When it shortens a diagnostic journey.

When it reduces uncertainty.

When it improves a clinical decision.

When it gives patients and families answers sooner.

Over time, I realized that I am most energized by problems that exist at the intersection of biology, engineering, medicine, and innovation.

I enjoy understanding systems, but I also want to build.

I enjoy research, but I also care deeply about translation.

I want to work on problems where scientific discovery, design, technology, and human needs come together.

Perhaps that is because I have spent my life on both sides of healthcare.

First as a patient.

Then as a builder.

Looking back, every stage of my journey seems connected by a single idea: reducing uncertainty.

The uncertainty of not knowing what is wrong.

The uncertainty of waiting for answers.

The uncertainty that patients, families, and clinicians face every day.

Whether through biotechnology, computational biology, diagnostics, healthcare innovation, or entrepreneurship, these are the problems I want to spend my career working on.

The tools may change.

The technologies will certainly change.

But the motivation has remained surprisingly constant.

I am still building for the people in the waiting room.