Vijender Chaitankar, Ph.D., received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science. His doctoral dissertation focused on developing novel algorithms and mathematical tools to reconstruct gene regulatory networks from high throughput gene expression data. After completing his doctoral degree at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Chaitankar held faculty positions at public and private universities.

He joined the National Eye Institute in May 2014 as a Research Fellow, where he used his computational biology skills to uncover regulatory mechanisms that underlie the development and degenerative disease progression of photoreceptor cells in the retina. In November 2017, he joined the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core Laboratory at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, where he supported several investigators with bioinformatics requirements. In March 2020, Dr. Chaitankar joined the NIAMS in the Lymphocyte Cell Biology Section led by Dr. John O’Shea. His primary job duties are to process and interpret disparate sequencing datasets to decode the molecular basis that underlies the differentiation of CD4+ T cells and their role in host defense and the pathogenesis of immune-mediated diseases.