Chitra Nayak

Chitra Nayak is an affiliated member of the Mangul lab through the AIM AHEAD fellowship in Leadership program. After earning her Ph.D. in physics from Cochin University of Science and Technology in India, she completed two postdoctoral fellowships - one in Bacterial Biophysics (Dalhousie University, Canada) and second in computational immunology (University of Toronto, Canada). She is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Physics at Tuskegee University. She serves as the director for the Center for Immersive Learning Experience at Tuskegee University. She is also part of the Center for Biomedical Research team where is she is engaged in cutting-edge research in the area of health disparities. Dr. Nayak is a scholar in Health Disparity Research Education Award Certificate Program (HDREP) and was selected as the prestigious Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics fellow (2019-2021). Her goal is to leverage her role as an educator to motivate students from the underserved communities to recognize the power of having equal representation in the fast-developing AI field, specifically related to health disparities.