Women Who Reign: Ramya Deshpande

“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road does not mean they are lost.” — Dalai Lama

Tell us about yourself along with a fun fact!
I’m a freshman studying Bioengineering and CS at Caltech. I fell in love with coding when I watched my sister run a C++ program that traced lesions in an MRI. My logical next step was to start reading her C++ for Dummies book, but as soon as I saw the words “Object Oriented Programming”, sixth-grade me was completely baffled. I decided to start small with HTML/CSS and built my way up to Python, Java and C++ until I was completely captured by the potential of programming, from building games and social networks to using machine learning to glean insights and answer interesting questions.
I love hackathons, Netflix, Nancy Drew and Naruto. I’ve worked as an Assistant Teacher with the Coding School and am currently working on their online platform for coding education, as well as as a curriculum developer for Code Circle; I also enjoy volunteering as a tutor for science and math. This summer, I’m excited to be working at the Guttman Lab at Caltech, where I’ll be analyzing ~160 billion data values combining chromatin interaction data, RNA-seq and ChIP-seq to investigate X-chromosome inactivation.