Chirag Jain
Assistant Professor
DBT / Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellow
Department of Computational and Data Sciences
Indian Institute of Science
Chirag Jain is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where he leads the ATCG Lab. His group works at the intersection of computer science and molecular biology, developing efficient algorithms and computational tools to tackle challenging, data-intensive problems in genomics.
His research spans genome sequencing, assembly, pangenomics, and computational genomics, with a focus on algorithms that combine strong theoretical foundations with practical scalability. The goal is to transform increasingly large and complex genomic datasets into actionable insights for biological discovery and human health.
Prior to joining IISc in 2020, Chirag was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 2019 and his B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 2014. He is a recipient of the IIT Delhi Graduates of the Last Decade Award (2024) and the Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award (2019).
Research Interests
• Computational biology
• Algorithms for genome sequencing and analysis
• Graph, string, and combinatorial algorithms
• Machine learning and AI for genomics
• High-performance and scalable computing
Teaching
[2026 January] DS202: Algorithmic Foundations of Big Data Biology
[2026 January] NPTEL- Algorithms in Computational Biology and Sequence Analysis
[2026 August] DS221: Introduction to Scalable Systems (jointly with Sathish Vadhiyar)
Recent Publications
Pangenome-based genome inference using integer programming
G Chandra, Md Hossen, S Scholz, A Dilthey, D Gibney, C Jain. RECOMB 2025
On the coverage required for diploid genome assembly
D Mahajan, C Jain, N Kashyap. IEEE TCBB 2025
Telomere-to-telomere assembly by preserving contained reads
S Kamath, M Bindra, D Pal, C Jain. Genome Research 2024
Coverage-preserving sparsification of overlap graphs for long-read assembly
C Jain. Bioinformatics 2023
Algorithms for colinear chaining with overlaps and gap costs
C Jain, D Gibney, S Thankachan. RECOMB 2021
Selected Awards
• Haryana Yuva Vigyan Ratna Award 2025 • IIT Delhi Graduates of Last Decade (GOLD) Award 2024 • India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship Award 2024 • NERSC HPC Achievement Award 2022 • Pratiksha Trust Young Investigator Award 2020 • Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award 2020 • ACM Supercomputing Reproducibility Award 2016 • NVIDIA Award for Best Paper using GPU Technologies IEEE HiPC 2014