Tirtharaj Dash

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus, India

prof_pic5.jpg

Office: CC-107

BITS Pilani, Goa Campus

Goa 403726, India

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus. My research is in Neurosymbolic AI, Deep Learning, and AI for Science, with applications primarily in chemistry and biology. I lead the MAHI Lab; see the lab site for research, openings, and team.

Before joining BITS Pilani, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK, working with Susanne Bornelöv on AI for genomics, and a Postdoctoral Affiliate of Trinity College, Cambridge (now an alumnus). Earlier, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, San Diego, in the Boolean Lab with Professor Debashis Sahoo, applying AI and Boolean analysis to RNA-seq and single-cell data in cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and macrophage biology.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at BITS Pilani in July 2022, supervised by Senior Professor Ashwin Srinivasan. My thesis, “Inclusion of Symbolic Domain-Knowledge into Deep Neural Networks”, developed methods for building deep neural networks from relational data and symbolic domain knowledge, with applications in drug discovery. See this page for more.

I hold an M.Tech in Computer Science from VSSUT, Burla (2014) and a B.Tech in Information Technology from NIST Berhampur (2012), with a Silver Medal in both.

View my Curriculum Vitae and Google Scholar profile.

latest news

Jun 9, 2026 ⚠️ OFFICIAL PUBLIC NOTICE ON SOCIAL MEDIA IMPERSONATION: Read here.
Feb 15, 2026 I am looking for a summer research fellow (Jun-July, 2026) to work with me on Protein Representation Learning. [Apply here]
Dec 26, 2025 I am in the program committee for IJCAI 2026 AI and Social Good.
Dec 1, 2025 I am joining BITS Pilani, Goa Campus as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science starting 11 Dec 2025. My primary research direction will be “AI for Science”.
Jun 3, 2025 Our Camformer paper is now published in Bioinformatics Advances.
Feb 16, 2025 Read our recent study on target-specific lead generation using LLMs and ILP: Preprint.
Jan 28, 2025 Read our recent study (Camformer) on gene regulation in yeast and XAI: Preprint.
Jan 27, 2025 Congratulations, Mohita and team for the journal accept for: Preprint.
Dec 26, 2024 I am in the program committee for IJCAI 2025 AI and Social Good.
Dec 5, 2024 I talked on “Logically” Explainable Deep Learning at Cambridge AI Club: [slides].

selected publications

  1. arXiv
    p-adic Bi-Filtrations for Topological Machine Learning on Genomic Sequences
    Dash, Tirtharaj, and Sachdeva, Gunja
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.06117 2026
    HTML Code
  2. arXiv
    BIRDNet: Mining and Encoding Boolean Implication Knowledge Graphs as Interpretable Deep Neural Networks
    Dash, Tirtharaj
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28739 2026
    HTML Code
  3. arXiv
    Symbolic Neural Generation with Applications to Lead Discovery in Drug Design
    Srinivasan, Ashwin,  Dash, Tirtharaj, Baskar, A, Bain, Michael, Dey, Sanjay Kumar, and Banerjee, Mainak
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.23379 2025
    HTML Code
  4. BioAdv
    Predicting gene expression using millions of yeast promoters reveals cis-regulatory logic
    Dash, Tirtharaj, and Bornelöv, Susanne
    Bioinformatics Advances Jun 2025
    HTML Code