Shyam M Saladi, PhD about me...

I (he/him/his) am a biophysicist and engineer excited about solving problems in the life sciences and healthcare. I especially love all things data, programming, visualization, and generally computer-related.

I currently lead Neelyx Labs where we are imagining the future of diagnostics where you can access high-quality medical testing through specimens collected yourself in the privacy of your own home and sent to a laboratory. Home collection expands access for everyone who finds traditional blood draws inconvenient, uncomfortable, or just incompatible with their busy lives!

Until recently, I was an NSF graduate research fellow at Caltech where we focused on applying computer-driven methods to streamline the experimental process of biochemistry research. Bil Clemons and I worked to increase efficiency at the lab-bench by helping scientists design more tailored experiments leading to my graduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. On the side as member of the Early Career Advisory Group, I joined eLife on their quest to rethink how research is communicated, in part, by considering how software tools can improve the quality of scientific output. As an undergraduate at Illinois, I explored the physiology and evolution of ion channels with Claudio Grosman and Eric Jakobsson and obtained my bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Molecular and Cellular Biology.

In my spare time, you might find me trialing a new espresso, hiking a new landscape, or pulling apart electronics (or talking with Claude).


In the spirit of healing, I acknowledge that Chicagoland, the place of my upbringing, sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. It was also a site of trade, travel, gathering and healing for more than a dozen other Native tribes and is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois. Learn more about this and other indigenous land in North America.