Blessy Antony

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
NSF COMPASS Center, Virginia Tech

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the NSF COMPASS Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA, advised by Dr. T. M. Murali and Dr. Anuj Karpatne. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Virginia Tech under their mentorship in December 2025.

My research interests include using computational methods such as natural language processing, graph machine learning, and generative modeling to solve impactful problems in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics. In my doctoral research, I worked on discovering viral hosts, mutations, and diseases using machine learning. Building on this line of research, I am now focused on developing foundation models and agentic frameworks to learn the evolution of zoonotic viruses using viral genomic data.

Prior to graduate school, I earned my bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India (2016), and spent four years as a Software Engineer at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in Mumbai — experience that shaped how I think about building and shipping research software.