Shakeel Ahmad Sheikh, PhD

I am Dr. Shakeel A. Sheikh, a researcher in AI for Healthcare, currently working as a Data Science Innovation Fellow at Novartis AG, Switzerland. My work focuses on advancing AI for target identification in oncology, including in-silico perturbation of scRNA-seq using foundation models and LLMs for proteomics and agentic workflows.

Previously, I served as a Postdoctoral Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute (EPFL, Switzerland) and Bielefeld University (Germany), where I worked on self-supervised learning, graph neural networks for healthcare applications. I hold a PhD from the University of Lorraine (Inria Research Institute), where I developed deep learning systems (StutterNet) for audio-based stuttering detection, contributing several peer-reviewed publications in top journals and conferences (IEEE JBHI, Neurocomputing, IEEE JSTSP, ICASSP, EUSIPCO, ACM Multimedia). My research spans multimodal deep learning, speech and audio processing, medical imaging, graph neural networks, and large language models, with applications across healthcare diagnostics, oncology, and low-resource NLP. I have been awarded prestigious fellowships and grants, including support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, German Humboldt Foundation, and multiple international summer schools (OxML, LxML, ALPS, DeepLearn).

Beyond research, I actively collaborate across academia and industry, teach graduate-level deep learning courses, and review for leading IEEE/ACM journals. I am also the founder of two educational and AI-driven initiatives:

• Kashmir Guidance
  — supporting students pursuing international education
• Jammu & Kashmir Institute for Artificial Intelligence (JKIAI)
  — a newly launched initiative aimed at advancing AI research, mentorship, and innovation in the region

I am passionate about building impactful AI systems—spanning healthcare problems that drive scientific discovery and improve human health.