About me

Updated October 28, 2025

/ɐ.ˈbʱɪ.ʃēːk ˈd̪ēː.sai/

I am a board-eligible general surgeon and a recent graduate of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson surgical residency program in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

My clinical practice is focused on robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery and emergency general surgery.

My research is focused on applying emerging technologies to solve clinical problems.

I am a graduate of Boston University's Seven-Year BA/MD Liberal Arts/Medical Education (SMED) program, where I studied linguistics and medical science.

Before medical school, I was a cadet firefighter and EMT at the Cabin John Park VFD in Bethesda, MD.

Visit my now page for more. Contact me for a complete copy of my CV.

Research

As surgical robots become increasingly autonomous, who ensures they're safe before they reach operating rooms?

Combining my prior experience in computational approaches to surgical risk modeling and outcomes assessment with my clinical training in robotic-assisted and emergency surgery, I am currently focused on developing regulatory policy for autonomous surgical robots before this technology reaches patients.

I was previously the Clinical Research Fellow at the Penn Center for Human Appearance, where I co-authored a textbook chapter on minimally invasive anterior component separation, published on machine learning methods to augment surgical risk modeling with unstructured data, and explored applications of 3-D computer vision for peri-operative decision-making. See selected publications.

What does "headclone" mean?

I have maintained a personal website since about 2006.

My first website, cybermonkey.com, was purchased because I needed a place to host the Adobe Flash games my friends and I were making in computer class. When we decided to begin posting our games on Newgrounds and AddictingGames, I found the cybermonkey username had already been claimed on those sites.

Around the same time, I saw a video of a talk Randall Munroe (the physicist behind xkcd) gave at Google in which he described how he had chosen xkcd as his webhandle -- basically, because it was meaningless. Earlier that week I had begun learning how to write actual code, and one of the first programs I wrote was a random word generator from dictionary.com. My first test of the program had erroneously output two words as a conjoined string instead of just one:

Hi! Your word of the day is: headclone.

I have been using headclone as my username/handle across the internet since then.

Music

I love music! I grew up listening to my parent's Michael Jackson and Bollywood records, and playing saxophone and drum set in school.

I began experimenting with remixing and music production during college, where my friends and I ran a radio show called Future Funk Airlines. Some of our segments can still be heard on SoundCloud, though most of them have been removed due to copyright claims. I started beatboxing and participating in battles around the same time.

Later, in medical school, I played drum set in a jam band with some friends. We called ourselves The Radial Groove and mostly played Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder covers.

Nowadays, I listen to a wide variety of music, including jazz, electronic, hip-hop, rock, latin, and Indian. I am still remixing music and beatboxing, though I haven't met a friend to riff with IRL since leaving Boston many years ago.

Sport

I played baseball and basketball throughout my childhood and adolescence. Randy Pausch discusses his own time playing sports as a kid during his beautiful last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, and he captures many of my own feelings towards my time growing up on the field and court. Team sports were a transformative experience as a kid and young man, and one I hope to share with my own children one day.

I was previously an avid cyclist and rock climber: throughout college and medical school, I would routinely log 50-150 miles a week on my single-speed road bike, and over the course of almost 7 years my friends and I worked our way up to sending V6 boulders and 5.11b free climbs. I’m also a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and fought competitively for 8 years.

After sustaining multiple injuries (the most severe of which required surgery to repair a fracture in my hand), I now mostly engage in mobility- and longevity-focused exercise.

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