Tanishq Mathew Abraham, SophontAI founder, explains how his Ph.D. in deep learning-based virtual staining supports his medical AI workflow

TMTanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D.@iScienceLuvr

(read to the end) As you may have heard, I have a Ph.D. 🤣 My Ph.D. (in Biomedical Engineering) gave me very valuable research experience and learned a lot about being a good researcher and managing research collaborations, skillsets that are serving me well at my startup @SophontAI. I am glad I got the opportunity to work on impactful research problems during my Ph.D. (applying AI to new microscopy technologies to improve cancer diagnostics and treatment decisions). I was working on generative AI in my PhD, earlier than 99.9% of people here even knew what it was. I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my research, with many hardships along the way. I try (with limited success unfortunately) to use Twitter as a professional platform, which is why I have Ph.D. in my name. If you ask Grok, even it agrees that there's nothing wrong with saying Ph.D. in your account name especially in a professional setting. I do agree that in general it's stupid to overly focus on it, but it's not like I make anyone irl call me Dr. Tanishq or anything. Of course I don't deny there are tons of frauds who have PhDs and academia has its issues. But that doesn't mean a PhD is completely useless for everyone or has no signal, especially in highly technical fields. I don't even think everyone should do a Ph.D. For me it made sense since it allowed me to more easily do research in an interdisciplinary environment while getting solid mentorship. PhDs are often really good opportunities to progress in life sciences careers (although good alternatives are starting to arise now). However, if you're doing pure AI, a PhD may not always be a good investment of your time, and worthwhile AI research can be done in a variety of ways outside of a PhD program. At my startup we hire both PhDs and non-PhDs as researchers, and our non-PhDs are making tremendous contributions to our company! Many of the best researchers that I respect a lot never did a PhD. If you want to hate me simply for the fact that I worked hard to get a PhD and I indicate that on a profile I mostly use for professional purposes, so be it! I am proud of the hard work I put into it and I will not be ashamed of it :)