Deputy Director
Dr. Meghana Kshirsagar is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Information Systems department at the University of Limerick. As Deputy Director of the Biocomputing and Developmental Systems Research Group, she has managed and supervised postdoctoral researchers, PhD candidates, Master’s students, and interns on multiple funded projects within the group in multidisciplinary areas spanning medical diagnostic systems, fintech and circuit design.She has secured €250,000 in funding as Principal Investigator from the Science Foundation Ireland National Challenge Fund project "ALTER: Unleashing the Power of AI and Digital Twins in Emergency Care" and is leading a diverse six-member team; Dr. Kshirsagar collaborates with emergency department consultants and specialists from ICHEC in her project “ALTER” to streamline patient flow in emergency care and optimize resource utilization using digital twins by integrating key healthcare services and predictive analytics with Machine learning. She is also managing an industrial project with Fidelity Investments, focusing on leveraging large language models for data governance.
A member of Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, Dr. Kshirsagar also serves on Lero’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee. Her research spans cutting-edge fields including AI, Machine Learning, and Blockchain. She is affiliated with Culhane Lab, the Limerick Digital Cancer Research Centre, and the School of Medicine, where she is collaborating on discovering novel biomarkers in pan-cancer studies using single cell data and patient-clinical trial matching using large language models.
Throughout her academic and research career, Dr. Kshirsagar has supervised a combined of 60 Masters and MSc dissertations, more than 70 final-year projects, and a PhD thesis, leading to over 100 publications in top international conferences and high-impact journals.
With over 18 years of experience as an Associate Professor at the Government Engineering College, Aurangabad, India, Meghana played a pivotal role in accreditation, curriculum development, and securing funds for empowerment of students and faculties within the department for pursuing training programs for upskilling and facilitating students to present research at international venues and participate in Hackathons. Her PhD, sponsored under the World Bank’s Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme, focused on applying interpretable machine learning techniques to investigate connectivity strengths in neuro-cognition diseases and predict brain tumor from real world MRS images.
During her work on the project “ Automatic Design of Digital Circuits” a Science Foundation Ireland-funded project with Intel, she developed innovative machine learning-driven approaches and supervised a PhD thesis to a successful defense. She actively contributed to scientific events and conferences such as organizing a special session in the Springer-sponsored SMARTCOM conference held in Bangkok, and an evolutionary hackathon, "Evathon 2021., held in Ireland."
Passionate about mentoring and fostering collaboration, Dr. Kshirsagar is committed to delivering exceptional learning experiences and advancing research that drives meaningful impact. She has successfully secured industrial scholarships for female students in computer science and continues to push female participation in STEM careers through her academic career and collaborative involvements.