Shyam Prabhakar obtained a BTech in Electronics Engineering from IIT Madras and a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University. He was sole recipient of the 2001 American Physical Society PhD thesis award for Beam Physics. Following postdoctoral fellowships in Mathematics at Stanford and Genomics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). His lab uses single-cell assays, spatial omics and novel algorithms for basic science and translational studies. Major multinational initiatives include the Asian Immune Diversity Atlas (AIDA) and an atlas of cell states in colorectal cancer. He is a coordinator of Human Cell Atlas-Asia and co-lead of the HCA Genetic Diversity Network. He manages the GIS Spatial and Single Cell Genomics Platform, heads single cell omics within Singapore's National Precision Medicine Program and is currently Associate Director, Spatial and Single Cell Systems and Senior Group Leader, Systems Biology and Data Analytics at GIS.