About me

Updated February 3, 2026

/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 emerging surgical technologies, with a special focus on autonomous surgical robots and other applications of machine learning in surgery.

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?

I currently lead the Autonomous Surgery Working Group within the Robotics Committee of SAGES, where we are working to guide the development of safe and efficacious autonomous surgical robots.

Penn Center for Human Appearance

I was previously the Clinical Research Fellow at the Penn Center for Human Appearance, where I studied machine learning methods to improve surgical risk modeling with unstructured data and applications of 3-D computer vision for peri-operative care, with a specific focus on abdominal wall reconstruction for incisional hernia.

We used computer vision techniques to identify morphometric features on pre-operative CTs that were highly predictive of incisional hernia. We then validated these features as optimal biomarkers and developed a morphometry-based pathophysiologic model for the formation of incisional hernia.

We also developed a natural language processing pipeline to label key features from operative notes (eg: type of suture used to reapproximate fascia), allowing our research group to extract specific intra-operative details ad hoc from large unstructured datasets and incorporate these features into our risk models without extensive manual chart review.

I co-authored a chapter for a hernia surgery textbook describing the surgical technique for minimally-invasive anterior component separation (MICS) and helped to secure $500,000+ in grant funding, including funding for two novel research projects that I independently initiated and which have continued and grown since my departure from the lab.

Early research

Earlier, during medical school, I was a researcher at the Eskandar Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, where I overhauled and prototyped the design of the OpBox, an open-source operant conditioning & experimental environment for small rodents. We built ten functional units and were able to reduce the per-unit cost by 35%. Our final open-source design was less than 10% the cost of commercial solutions available at that time.

I also analyzed rapid-sample EEG to study neural activity during decision making and developed diagnostic software to debug EEG signal anomalies.

Besides medicine

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

Music is a lifelong passion of mine. I grew up listening to my parents' Michael Jackson and Bollywood records and played saxophone and drumset through school.

In college, I began producing electronic music and beatboxing, where my friends and I co-hosted a weekly radio show we 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.

Later, in medical school, I played drumset in a jazz ensemble with some friends. We called ourselves The Radial Groove and mostly played Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder covers.

Nowadays, I am learning acoustic guitar (difficult to play saxophone or drumset while being a good apartment neighbor!) and mostly listen to jazz, electronic, and hip-hop.

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.

In my teens, I earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and fought competitively for eight years. I was a junior striking instructor at our dojang for the final two of those years.

Later, during college and medical school, I was an avid cyclist and rock climber, regularly cycling 50+ miles weekly and progressing to V6 boulders and 5.11b free climbs over seven years in the rock gym and outdoors.

Nowadays, my workout regimen consists of hatha yoga for mobility and flexibility, and kettlebell training for strength.

Visit my now page for more.