Built a pipeline to study disease in sea stars, accepted at an IEEE conference

Sea star populations have been devastated by disease, and the clues often hide in genetic data left over from other studies. Sidharth built a full computational pipeline for the bat star that strips out the animal's own DNA, classifies the remaining microbial sequences in the cloud, and removes false positives with strict similarity and alignment filters. Custom R tools then turn the results into heatmaps across locations and time. He turned research he had been carrying on his own into his first accepted paper.

FIELDBioinformatics & Marine Biology

RESULTFirst-author paper accepted at an IEEE conference

VENUEIEEE, 2026

Sidharth S. Iyer, YRI FellowIEEE

BEFORE THE FELLOWSHIP

A 12th grader at Palo Alto High School with independent research on sea star pathogens that had never been published or presented.

AFTER

First author of an end-to-end bioinformatics workflow for marine disease research, accepted at an IEEE conference.

THE LEDGER

01First-author paper accepted at an IEEE conference

02End-to-end pipeline from raw sequencing reads to microbial heatmaps

03Multi-tier filtering with at least 85% similarity and 50 bp alignment thresholds