NAVRAJ
SIKAND
Research Software Engineer
Building computational infrastructure for DNA nanotechnology and developing machine learning models for molecular design at Arizona State University.
About Me
I'm a Computer Science student at Arizona State University and Research Software Engineer at the Biodesign Institute's Šulc Group.
My work sits at the intersection of machine learning, biophysics, and software engineering. I architect computational infrastructure that powers DNA nanotechnology research for a global community of scientists.
From deploying HPC clusters to developing SE(3) diffusion models for molecular dynamics, I build tools that democratize access to cutting-edge computational research.
Selected Work
Deployed and manage an 8-server research computing cluster with dedicated application and storage nodes for an international research community.
- 200+ CPU cores, 500 GB RAM, 100+ TB storage with GPU resources
- Configured VPN access, email delivery, networking, and monitoring
- Supporting 150+ weekly user registrations
- Mentoring 2 undergraduate researchers
Public web platform for coarse-grained DNA/RNA simulation, letting experimentalists run simulations without touching cluster schedulers or command-line tooling.
- Designed backend architecture and REST APIs for high-throughput simulation workflows
- Built Dockerized worker system with credit-based job scheduling
- Real-time status monitoring for external collaborators
- Presented at Foundations of Nanoscience (Salt Lake City, 2025)
Complete modernization of DNA nanotechnology research database platform.
- Reduced page load by 80% (12.7MB → 2.6MB)
- Implemented sub-10ms typo-tolerant search
- Achieved 3× user growth in one month
- Eliminated server dependency for search queries
Unified authentication and data backend for cross-platform research workflows.
- Centralized authentication for multiple applications
- Type-safe REST API with schema validation
- Eliminated data inconsistencies across platforms
- Serving 150+ active weekly researchers
3D DNA/RNA molecular design platform with version control capabilities.
- Implemented Git-style commit history and branching
- Added local-first storage, eliminating a class of data-loss bugs
- Created shareable permalink system
- One-click path from design to oxCloud simulation submission
Local-LLM systems for the lab: cited research reports, documentation Q&A, and API script generation over a 20,000-line TypeScript codebase.
- Built RAG pipelines with open-weight models (Qwen, Gemma, PaddleOCR, Nomic)
- Deployed on lab servers with authenticated researcher access
- Generates JavaScript API scripts from natural-language queries
- Context-length tuning for document analysis and embedding search
Technical Expertise
Core Programming
Web Development
Infrastructure
AI/ML
Let's Build Something
Open to research collaborations and interesting projects