Shyam Prabhakar obtained a B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from IIT Madras and a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University. He was sole recipient of the 2001 American Physical Society PhD thesis award for Beam Physics. Following postdoctoral fellowships in Mathematics at Stanford and Genomics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). He heads the Singapore Single Cell Network and the GIS Spatial and Single Cell Genomics Platform (S2GP), an open facility for all researchers in Singapore. He co-leads: 1) the Genetic Diversity Network within the international Human Cell Atlas (HCA) single cell consortium, 2) HCA Asia, 3) the Asian Epigenome Network, and 4) A*STAR’s AI and Analytics (AI3) Horizontal Programme. He is currently Associate Director, Spatial and Single Cell Systems and Senior Group Leader, Systems Biology and Data Analytics at GIS.