Data Science and “state of the art” artificial intelligence approaches have enormous potential in healthcare by enhancing patient care and improving clinical outcomes !

Sonali Tamhankar, our next pathbreaker, Senior Data Scientist (Advanced Analytics) at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (Seattle), supports quality improvement, operational, and strategic efforts with the objective of ensuring best possible care to patients.

Sonali talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about obtaining a Master’s degree in Mathematics after her PhD in Physics, along with a Certificate in Data Science, and transitioning from being a theoretical physicist to a healthcare data scientist.

For students, though you might not have all the answers to where you want to go, it is important to start with where you are, with what you have. 

Sonali, can you share your growing up years with our young readers? 

Hello, dear reader. I hope you are enjoying exploring different career paths on this site. I am picturing you collecting data points like interesting shells on a seashore. Each day, we have the rest of our life in front of us, with endless possibilities. Our daily choices, big and small, shape them. The more ‘data points’ we have about the possibilities, the better choices we can make. I share my journey as one more data point for you, that might help you in some small way to make your decisions, and find and realize your dreams. All the best to you as you go forth and create the life you want to live. 

I grew up in Mumbai, India. I had a fun and happy childhood, with my parents, my sister, grandma, and lots of friends. Living in Seattle, USA, I can now see how different my schooling experience was compared to the norm here, with 70 students per classroom, 3 per bench, in a school without a playground or a library. We did not have a lot of the privileges that kids here might take for granted, and we had others that kids here might be longing for today – our lives were almost idyllic with innocent and deep friendships. 

Math was always my favorite subject, and so was Physics in high school – I liked the elegant simplicity and predictability of these subjects. I hated Geography because it seemed so foreign. I never imagined that I would ever actually see ‘leaves shaped like needles’, they seemed impossible and made-up. History seemed irrelevant – I did not at all enjoy the concept of people fighting each other, and wanted nothing to do with it. I always enjoyed languages – I studied in Marathi medium, learned my ABCs in my fifth grade, and also did a tiny bit of Hindi and Sanskrit. I found the ‘extra’ subjects like book binding, the Diwali homework of making crafts out of different colored pulses, very cute. 

There were slums right next to our apartment building; this was very common in Mumbai especially at that time. We used to see the slum children playing, and the women carrying water. We heard daily fights and witnessed public domestic violence, even though the very term is almost an oxymoron. As a child myself, I remember feeling curious about the lives of people who lived there, and making my friends play ‘slums’ with me instead of playing house! 

All these years later, this thread of curiosity about the human condition everywhere has remained, along with an innate respect for human dignity and decency. My love for Math and Physics has very much guided my professional path and much more – they occupy me blissfully in my free time, and they are my sturdy rocks that offer comfort and consolation when the world seems too illogical and confusing. Through the years, I have also come to appreciate history and geography – I love to travel, experience different cultures and landscapes. Historical and geographical forces shape these cultures and landscapes with much of the same logical elegance I found in the ‘harder’ subjects. One just needs to distance oneself a bit to see it.

Languages have remained interesting to me – I like writing poems and learning new languages. 

What did you do for graduation/post graduation? 

I studied Physics at IIT-Kharagpur for my Bachelor’s, and at IIT-Mumbai for my Master’s degree. 

I made some lifelong friendships especially in the three years at Kharagpur. There were less than 5 percent women students, so we were a tight-knit community. A group of us reconnected at a reunion just before Covid hit, and have kept in touch on whatsapp – this was such a blessing during the turbulent years. I also learned Bengali in Kharagpur, fulfilling my dream to read the original version of Tagore’s poems. 

IIT-Mumbai was very nice too, with more friends and exceptional education. I won the ‘silver medal’ for scoring the highest in my MSc class. 

I didn’t quite realize at the time what a privilege it was to be educated at the IITs. At the time, our education was highly subsidized and there was no way my parents could have afforded to pay commensurately for this quality of education. For those of you reading this who do not come from privileged backgrounds, I would like to share a regret. I did not learn, at the time, to truly spread my wings. My mindset was that I had to focus only on my studies at the exclusion of everything else. There was a huge culture gap between my circumstances and that of most of the other students, and the ‘imposter syndrome’ was very real. There were so many opportunities at IIT that I did not avail myself of, because I did not truly feel like I belonged. One of my friends strongly encouraged me to try out for the track team, for example, and I wish I had worked on my physical fitness and participated in all that IITs had to offer. It has taken me a very long time to learn that I am allowed to occupy space on this earth and live life fully. Please remember, dear reader, that you are, too. 

Can you share with us some of the key influences that led you to such an offbeat, unconventional, and unique career in sciences? 

The elegance of the subject recommended itself. It was a close call between Physics and Mathematics – I reasoned that I would also get to do Math anyway if I picked Physics as my career. 

I was blessed with wonderful teachers in Math and Physics till 12th grade, who fed my interest in these subjects. 

I got a score of 16/100 on the Maharashtra State Mathematics Olympiad, which actually placed me 21st in the state, making me the lowest ranked person in the state allowed to write the National Olympiad. This was almost a miracle; most of the questions on that test were like “state and prove x theorem” – all ‘x’s truly unknown variables for me! The one question that saved me was something that could be proved by recursion, which I had studied while preparing for the IIT-JEE – the ‘joint entrance exam’ for the ‘Indian Institutes of Technology’. Once my teachers knew of my ‘success’, they selflessly put in extra hours, coaching me 1:1 to prepare me for the National exam. This was one of the most fun times of my life, learning all kinds of advanced math and having that kind of access to subject matter experts. In India, the 11th and 12th grades are called ‘junior college’, usually taught on the same campus as undergrad, by the same teachers. I’m grateful to the Mathematics teachers from Vaze College for this happy experience. With their efforts, I scored 61/100 on the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad, standing 6th in India. I attended two training camps at IISC Bangalore, away from home for the first time, the only girl in a 40-strong cohort the first year, and one out of two girls the second year. 

There were opportunities taken and opportunities missed. Attending Math Olympiad training camps, and studying at the IITs were formative experiences – I am still close to my friends from IITs, who are exceptionally talented women. We bonded as 22 women in a class of about 500 students in our year, and ours was considered a really large batch of women! 

How did you make a transition to a new career in Data Science? Tell us about your career path 

My Physics career was reasonably straight-forward. After getting a Bachelor’s in Physics at IIT-Kharagpur, I did my Master’s at IIT-Mumbai. I went to Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB) for my PhD. (I did get admission to University of Pennsylvania, but they did not have funding that year, and sincerely (I know because others who applied didn’t get this wording in their letters) encouraged me to apply the following year. I had reached out to Dr. Abhay Ashtekar at UPenn because I had enjoyed his seminar on Loop Quantum Gravity, which may have been my path if I had applied again at UPenn, but I went to Indiana University on a student visa, and was too scared to think about applying again and going somewhere else). 

At IUB, I did my PhD in ‘Lattice Gauge Theory’. This included numerical simulations of ‘Quantum Chromodynamics’ or the theory of the strong force. I did a lot of programming, which laid the foundation for my transition to data science later. 

I did a Postdoc at University of Kentucky. I did have an opportunity to go to DESY, Germany, or TRIUMF, Canada, but the timing of offers was tricky. The group in Kentucky was wonderful, and in retrospect, living in a different country might have been interesting too. 

I joined Hamline University, St Paul, MN as a tenure-track Physics professor after finishing my post-doc. I worked here for two years, but then left for family reasons, having my son a year later in Portland. 

I went back to school, thinking of getting a PhD in Math this time. I stopped after getting a Masters in Math with a Specialization in Optimization, partly because I was getting divorced and needed a proper job. After teaching Physics at Seattle University for a few years, I switched to healthcare Data Science. Along with the financial drivers, the work in this domain is also emotionally satisfying, because healthcare is tied more closely to daily human lives than quantum chromodynamics calculations! 

How did you get your first break? 

Changing fields was difficult – my first break in healthcare data science came when my son’s preschool teacher told me that her husband worked at a hospital doing analysis. Someone at this place really liked my resume, and truly appreciated my accomplishments like the Math Olympiad rank. They decided to give me a chance in healthcare, hiring me first as a contractor – I am so grateful to this person! Soon I earned my place as a full-time employee, which set me on a path to my second career as a Data Scientist in Healthcare. 

What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you address them? 

I seriously lacked confidence, I have always felt like an imposter, like people will find out any moment that I know nothing. Even as I write this, there is a voice in my head saying ‘if you were any good, you would be working on a project right now; instead you are vainly writing about yourself’! One interesting way that helped me combat this is to realize that it is also kind of vain to put yourself down too much, because it is also being self-absorbed. So, dear reader, I am writing about my experiences, for what they are worth – no more and no less. 🙂 

I really lacked knowledge and awareness about possibilities and my options. I could have ‘played my cards better’ if I had known how. That is why a site like this is so awesome – it will allow you to picture your life in different hats – play it out, see how it fits, how you like it. Take your time, get advice from multiple sources, and make your best decisions. At the same time, also know that life keeps giving you chances, and there are so many wildly different ways of living a wonderful life! 

Where do you work now? What problems do you solve? 

I work as a Senior Clinical Data Scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. I really like this work because each line of data I am working on is about someone’s life. It feels like a special privilege to be a part of their journey in this way, and to support them on their path in any small way. As a clinical data scientist, my job is to support quality improvement, operational, and strategic efforts. Fred Hutch is constantly working to ensure that we deliver the best possible care to our patients. This means exploring ways to reduce avoidable emergency room visits, supporting our providers by balancing their workload, and using data to make a case for care navigators for our patients, who help patients manage the care of a complex condition like cancer. 

As they see patients, doctors and other care providers make notes in the ‘electronic medical records’ or EMR. The ‘Epic EMR’ system Fred Hutch uses has data marts on the back-end that pull the data from the live front-end that the providers use. I have been trained on Epic, and I use these data marts as my starting point. I pull data using SQL, and then use python to process it further. There are many data science libraries, including numpy, pandas, and many others. I often work on cloud computing platforms like AWS. Recently, I am very excited about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) methods and deep learning. It has been an exciting ride to keep myself up-to-date on developments in this fast changing field, and think about applications within my domain, developed in an ethical, responsible, and equitable manner. 

What skills are needed for your role? How did you acquire the skills? 

Like the GenAI skillset, I have mostly learned the skills needed on my own. I have a very strong foundation in mathematics and programming. I have built on this through coursera, youtube, technical meetups, and other online sources. I truly enjoy learning and understanding concepts. Mastering skills gives you a sense of power and the ability to work ‘in the zone’ that is pure joy.

What’s a typical day like? 

I work from home post-pandemic, so my typical day has a pretty fluid work-life boundary. I am expected to deliver on my work commitments and have a good amount of flexibility in structuring my daily work to meet this goal. This means, for example, that I can go for a walk at lunch time during short winter days, and make up my time later in the day. I appreciate this freedom a lot. My days include meetings with business partners to either get requirements, discuss possibilities, or share my work output, depending on the stage of the project. A lot of my work is solo – diving deep into the data, writing code, validating and understanding the results, thinking of tweaks and different approaches to help meet business needs. There is room for creativity, which also I enjoy. I like community building – I run a Generative AI Collaborative Learning Club at work, and a Destination Health Equity Meetup in an individual capacity. 

What is it you love about this job? 

I like the mix of productivity, creativity, and flexibility this job offers. I still like physics, and outside of my Fred Hutch job, I do get time on weekends and weekday evenings to continue thinking about interesting problems like the nature of time. It’s incredibly fascinating, isn’t it, how time is different from other dimensions – we can move forward and backward in space at will, but experience time helplessly in such a passive manner. The second law of thermodynamics or the arrow of time is also intriguing, especially when contrasted with the fact that the fundamental theories are almost completely symmetric in terms of time moving forward or backward, except for a very small CP violation. I write geeky silly poems, for example, see – https://medium.com/@tamhankar.sonali/physics-life -100-human-poetry-5a07f7589423. 

How does your work benefit society? 

In a very small way, but hopefully positively. This is partly why I have chosen to work as a healthcare data scientist, and keep physics as a very dear side endeavour, almost a hobby. I hope my Fred Hutch work helps our patients in some small way. I like that occasionally, an interested student or someone with difficult healthcare experiences stumbles across the Destination Health Equity effort, and is heartened to see a small community investing their time towards this goal. I am also serving as a mentor and a fellow at the National Institute of Health (NIH) effort at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Health Equity – AIM-AHEAD (https://www.aim-ahead.net/lfcohort2/). 

I really like the quote by Mahatma Gandhi – ‘Whatever you do will be small, but it is important that you do it’. 

Tell us an example of a specific memorable work you did that is very close to you! 

At Virginia Mason Medical Center (my job before I joined Fred Hutch), I worked on a diabetes dashboard. The idea was to reach out to patients who had high HbA1c values but were not seen by a provider or gotten a lab test done recently enough, indicating they were ‘out of care’. Bringing them back in care would help them manage their diabetes better, avoiding complications down the road. This was a focused effort by many people, and I was pulled in to do the data and analytics piece. Hundreds of patients were brought back ‘in care’ – this work is close to me because this was the most direct way my work may have had a small impact on someone’s life. 

I am also really liking the work I am able to do now using “state of the art” artificial intelligence methods – there is enormous potential. This work is not yet implemented because our organization is developing policies for using artificial intelligence in patient care, and I hope that once we are able to responsibly use these powerful methods, we may be able to make a significant impact. 

Your advice to students based on your experience? 

I don’t know about advice, but just some thoughts. 

First thought – ‘Know yourself and your goals’. Think through what might make you happy, and set a handful of top level buckets in which you want to grow over the years. You wouldn’t board a train without knowing something about the direction in which it’s headed, would you? Do make long term plans, for the next years and decades and your whole life – flexible and tentative, no worries if you don’t have all the answers yet, “start with where you are, with what you have”. 

Second thought – ‘Invest in yourself’. This one took me a long time to learn. Anyone reading this has probably years in front of them, and younger readers likely have decades. More than anything else, take yourself as your top project, and truly invest in yourself. You are allowed to have dreams and to go after them with everything you’ve got. Also, you are stuck with yourself for the rest of your life anyway – make sure you have the best company on this ride. 

Third thought – ‘Focus on linear things’ that build and grow over time, limiting the time you spend on circular things where you won’t have much to show tomorrow for your time spent today. This one is a more practical tip, ‘the how’ that accompanies the first two high level thoughts. 

In my life, these ideas are reflected in choosing a handful of constant threads of work/data science, health equity/social endeavors, my family, physics/intellectual pursuits, and hobbies/poetry etc. It feels nice to look back when you build on these constant threads year over year, or decade over decade. 

Future Plans? 

All of us are always a work in progress. As I finish writing this, it’s looking sunny out, I will probably go for a walk on my favorite trail, do yoga, spend time with my loved ones – simple daily joys. Over the week, there are work deliverables to wrap up, as I am leaving on a trip to Morocco next weekend, something I have been dreaming of for quite a while. Over the next months, there are small and big goals along my threads – sometimes one takes the center stage and others recede in the background, and sometimes another. Over the rest of my career, I envision a continued focus on artificial intelligence, especially in the context of healthcare and social good. I am interested in realizing the full potential of these powerful new tools while maintaining a focus on safety and equity. (Along the lines of my latest talk – https://www.nlpsummit.org/be-like-water-nlp-and-ge nai-opportunities-and-challenges-in-healthcare/) 

Conclusion – 

Bye, dear reader. Hope you enjoyed these stories, and maybe found a nugget or two that is relevant in your life. Please feel free to reach out and wish you all the best!