About Akshaya Vijaya Annapragada

Akshaya Vijaya Annapragada was born in Fremont, California, to parents who immigrated from India in the 1980s to pursue their education. Living in three states before she was five, Akshaya grew up primarily in Pearland and Manvel, towns outside of Houston, Texas. Akshaya’s parents encouraged her to pursue her dreams, no matter how unconventional. This spirit led Akshaya to earn multiple black belts in martial arts and represent the United States in international competition, while simultaneously graduating as valedictorian from the Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions, a public magnet school in Houston.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Akshaya’s interdisciplinary experiences drew her to a physician-scientist path. She was elected managing editor of the Harvard Political Review, formulated nanoparticles for drug delivery in Samir Mitragotri’s laboratory, and taught coding to grade-school girls with Harvard’s Women in Computer Science. As a Planetary Health Undergraduate Scholar, she conducted field research in Madagascar under Christopher Golden’s mentorship, and created mathematical models linking infectious disease and nutrition, to inform public health interventions.

Akshaya graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, earning an AB with highest honors in applied mathematics and an SM in engineering sciences. She then joined the Johns Hopkins University MD/PhD program.

In her PhD work, mentored by Victor Velculescu and Rob Scharpf, Akshaya designed machine learning methods that illuminate the full genome, including repeat elements in the “dark genome”, enabling sensitive detection of disease-related genomic changes in the blood. She built whole-genome blood tests for accessible screening of liver and ovarian cancers, and pioneered the use of these “liquid biopsies” beyond oncology, including for detection of fibrotic liver disease. In other work she tackled clinical challenges at the intersection of AI and medicine, including monitoring critically ill patients and forecasting pandemic trajectories.

Her work has led to publications, in journals including Science Translational Medicine and Nature Medicine, pending patents, licensed technologies used in clinical trials, and a company, Artemyx, that Akshaya co-founded. Akshaya’s work has received many honors including a Siebel Scholarship, Forbes 30 Under 30, the Harvard College Detur Book Prize, and the AACR Women in Cancer Research Award.

Akshaya aspires to a career as a physician-scientist, leading a lab that drives fundamental discovery, clinical translation, and entrepreneurial spin-offs, moving technology from concept to clinic and improving how we diagnose and treat disease.