Personal Information
Full Name: Bishab Pokharel
Location: Hamburg, Germany
Languages: English (Fluent), German (B1), Nepali (Native), Hindi
Nationality: Nepalese
Professional Experience
Data Scientist
Apr 2026 - Present
Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology (ITMP), Hamburg, Germany
- Working at the interface of drug discovery, medical data science and generative AI, focusing on large language models, graph-based methods and large-scale analytics for biomedical and chemical data.
- Contributing as a data scientist to large European and German-funded consortia in translational medicine and pharmacology, including the Innovative Health Initiative project SYNTHIA and the EU project Proxidrugs.
- Designing and implementing data and AI pipelines for early-stage drug discovery, including integration of knowledge graphs, classical machine learning and modern LLM-based approaches.
Student Assistant
May 2025 - Mar 2026
Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology (ITMP), Hamburg, Germany
- Assisted in research activities on the use of large language models and neural networks on knowledge graphs for drug discovery.
- Supported development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI pipelines for small-molecule and target discovery.
- Contributed to the data preparation, evaluation and documentation of AI workflows within EU and German-funded research projects.
Werkstudent Data and Analytics
Jan 2024 - Apr 2025
Crossnative, Hamburg, Germany
- LLM training and fine-tuning (Mistral, Llama) for client-specific business use cases.
- Machine learning optimisation and integration for analytics-driven decision-making.
- Cloud services and infrastructure management (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Terraform).
- MLOps and LLMOps: monitoring and deployment of ML and LLM models (Azure AutoML, Azure OpenAI Service).
- Containerisation and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes.
Werkstudent in ML Development and Infrastructure
Feb 2023 - Aug 2023
Adalab UG, Hamburg, Germany
- Docker and Kubernetes Cluster Management for Service Deployment and Scaling
- Web and RESTful API Development (Python Tornado, Flask, Django)
- AI Model Integration and Deployment (Diffusion Models, GPTs) with Kubernetes and Containerization
- Rigorous Testing and Monitoring for AI Model Reliability and High Availability
Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Feb 2022 - Sep 2022
Robofied, Indore, India
- Data Analysis & Expressive and Insights driven Data Visualizations using Pandas & Matplotlib
- Training and Testing Machine Learning & Deep Learning Models using Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, Keras, TensorFlow
- Development of Fulfillment Based Healthcare Chatbot with RASA Framework
- API Development & Deployment with FastAPI and Flask Frameworks
- Development of Test Driven ML UI with Streamlit
- Deployment, Regular Update & Monitoring of ML Models on GCP & Amazon EC2 Platforms
Machine Learning Engineer Intern
Dec 2020 - Jan 2021
Technocolabs, India
- Comment classification on Twitter Livestream data with Word Vector Embeddings (word2vec, BERT)
- Development of Interactive web-app for real-time toxic words classification from sentences
- Deployment and monitoring of ML across Google Cloud Platform
Data Science & Business Analytics Intern
Nov 2020 - Dec 2020
The Sparks Foundation, Singapore (Remote)
- Data Visualization and Analysis using Tableau and PowerBI
- Data Curation, EDA, Analysis and Insights generation on Plant Disease Data with SVM, PCA, Bagging (Ensemble Learning models) and Boosting (XGBoost, CatBoost & LightGBM)
Education
M.Sc. Intelligent Adaptive Systems
Oct 2022 - Jan 2026
Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Final Grade: 1.6
- Specialization in Generative AI, LLMOps, Bioinformatics, and Cheminformatics
- Master Thesis: "Leveraging LLMs for Enhanced Drug Discovery: Extracting Insights from Patents and Scientific Documents"
Grade: 1.0
B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering
2018 - 2022
Lovely Professional University (LPU), Phagwara, India
Final Grade: 8.27
- Focus on AI/ML applications and software systems
- Minor in Data Science
- Bachelors Thesis: "Sahayak: An Interactive AI-Powered Web Healthcare System"
Higher Secondary Education
2016 - 2018
Kathmandu Model Secondary School, Kathmandu, Nepal
Technical Skills
Programming Languages
AI/ML Technologies
Cloud & DevOps
Web Development
Open Source Projects
Sahayak Health
2022
A sophisticated implementation of RASA Conversational AI on a HealthCare Bot integrated with a Web and Android Software written in Python, Java and JavaScript.
Research Interests
- Generative AI for text and vision applications
- Large Language Models in bioinformatics and cheminformatics
- Knowledge Graph integration with AI systems
- AI applications in drug discovery and healthcare
- LLMOps and production AI systems
Other Interests
Hobbies: Football, Literature, Hiking