About me

Updated August 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 interests include robotic-assisted and minimally invasive surgery, abdominal wall reconstruction, and the treatment of skin cancers.

My research is broadly 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

My research is broadly focused on applying emerging technologies to solve clinical problems. I am currently exploring novel methods that leverage computation in order to anticipate and mitigate surgical risk.

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 pre- & post-operative decision-making. See selected publications.

During medical school, I participated in research at the Eskandar Lab at MGH. Activities included the use of rapid-sampling EEG to investigate neural activity during decision making and overhauling the design of the OpBox, an open-source operant conditioning and experimental environment for small rodents in use at 5+ MGH labs and internationally; I prototyped its design and built 12 functional units, reducing per-unit cost by 35% to <10% cost as compared to commercial solutions. I additionally developed diagnostic software to debug EEG signal anomalies and performed EEG signal analysis.

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've decided to instead focus on mobility- and longevity-focused exercise.

Visit my now page for more.