CV

Curriculum vitae. A PDF version is also available for download.

Contact Information

Name Govinda M. Kamath
Professional Title Senior Scientist, 10x Genomics

Professional Summary

Applied ML researcher/engineer with 5+ years turning algorithms into production systems used by biologists and engineers, spanning fundamental academic research (PhD, Stanford) and biotech industry practice (10x Genomics). I work in tight collaboration with experimental biologists to design analyses and build pipelines they can depend on — across single-cell, spatial transcriptomics, and imaging platforms — with a career-long focus on making biological inference rigorous: avoiding false discoveries and building methods scientists can actually trust.

Experience

  • 2021 - present

    Pleasanton, CA

    Senior Scientist
    10x Genomics
    • Visium HD spatial transcriptomics: worked in a tight loop with biologists on assay and protocol development, designing and optimizing metrics for sensitivity, specificity, and false-positive detection. Algorithms that extract spatial signal from data — effectively a 30,000-sparse-channel image — ship in Visium HD and run in production for every Visium HD customer.
    • Production ML pipelines: led end-to-end development of ML models for cell-type annotation and nucleus segmentation — from data collection and labeling through training, evaluation, and production deployment — across all three 10x Genomics platforms: Visium, Xenium, and Chromium (single-cell).
    • Engineering infrastructure: own production-quality pipelines end-to-end within 10x Genomics’ large shared codebase (primarily Python and Rust, also Go and C/C++), shipped in released software, with reproducible builds via Bazel.
    • Agentic AI for single-cell workflows: building a tool-use agentic environment that automates single-cell analysis workflows, using eval-driven development to measure agent performance, correctness, and failure modes.
    • Led a team of 3 ML scientists/engineers building ML algorithms from data collection through production.
  • 2019 - 2021

    Cambridge, MA

    Postdoctoral Researcher
    Microsoft Research New England
    • Research on knowledge distillation, bandit-based rank-one models, and connections between sequence alignment and compression; published at ICLR and NeurIPS.
    • Advised by Lester Mackey.
  • 2019 - 2019

    Palo Alto, CA

    PhD Intern
    Applied Protocol Research
  • 2018 - 2018

    Mountain View, CA

    Machine Learning Resident
    Google X
  • 2017 - 2017

    Bangalore, India

    Research Intern, Theory Group
    Microsoft Research
    • Worked on spectral clustering on a planted block model.
  • 2016 - 2016

    Redmond, WA

    Research Intern, Theory Group
    Microsoft Research
    • Worked on the DNA storage project: trace reconstruction and data analysis.
  • 2012 - 2013

    Bangalore, India

    Research Associate, Codes and Signal Design Lab
    Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
    • Project: Codes for Distributed Storage (funded by NetApp Inc.).

Education

  • 2014 - 2019

    Stanford, CA

    PhD
    Stanford University
    Electrical Engineering
    • Advisor: David Tse.
    • Thesis: Almost linear time algorithms for problems from Computational Genomics.
    • GPA: 4.0/4.0
  • 2013 - 2014

    Berkeley, CA

    Doctoral candidate
    University of California, Berkeley
    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • 2010 - 2012

    Bangalore, India

    Master of Engineering (M.E.)
    Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
    Electrical Communication Engineering
    • Thesis: On codes for Distributed Storage and Locality of Error Correction.
    • Class rank: 1/28
  • 2006 - 2010

    Surathkal, India

    Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.)
    National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK)
    Electronics and Communication Engineering
    • Class rank: 1/74