Interview with Enakshi Saha: Sex Differences in Biological Mechanisms and Their Impact on Drug Discovery

Dr. Enakshi Saha is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health. Her research focuses on Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, and their applications in Genetics and Precision Therapy. Before joining the University of South Carolina, Dr. Saha was a postdoctoral research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. John Quackenbush in the Department of Biostatistics. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of Statistics, in June 2021, with a dissertation titled “Flexible Bayesian Methods for High Dimensional Data.” Her academic journey began at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, where she completed both her Bachelor’s (BStat) and Master’s (MStat) degrees in Statistics. The goal of today’s discussion with Dr. Enakshi is to explore her recent and highly relevant work on sex differences in biological mechanisms and their implications in translational medicine, particularly in drug discovery. We will focus on two of her papers: ”Gender Differences in the Effects of Chronic Diseases on Daily Physical Activity Patterns in Older Adults: Analysis of Objectively Measured Physical Activity in NHATS 2021,” which explores wearable technology and accelerometers. ”Gene Regulatory Networks Reveal Sex Differences in Lung Adenocarcinoma.” 

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