Ben Silver

Research

Applying what I learn in school to make a real difference has always been my ultimate goal. I've spent time working in a physical lab and also in silico, and the latter fascinates me: data can be used to reveal more data, an interesting recursion.

Mass cytometry at the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center

Massachusetts General Hospital, since July 2026

  • Current mass cytometry clustering algorithms require manual inputs, the goal of the project was to explore ways to minimize manual inputs. This would open up the use of these mass cytometry tools to more people and help standardize how the tools are used.
  • We built a Python pipeline that identifies immune cell populations across vaccine stimulations to use as a tool to investigate how to augment these algorithms to make them more user friendly. It handles the whole preprocessing path in one pass: FCS parsing, arcsinh transformation, and dimensionality reduction with PCA and UMAP.
  • We are looking to add biological validation metrics to the existing clustering, so the population assignments are not just based in math, but also in real biology.
  • Now extending it to new datasets (Flu & ALS), using X-shift to track changes in population abundance and adapting the Shannon and Simpson diversity notebooks I wrote for the first project.

Working with

Richard Dzeng
Ethan Rabinowitz

Scale

Fifty-plus parameters per cell, past a million events per dataset

Method

Python, NumPy, scikit-learn, FlowSOM, OMIQ, X-shift, UMAP and PCA

Flexible electrode arrays at Sonkusale Research Labs

Tufts University, February to May 2026

  • I developed and validated fabrication protocols for flexible electrode arrays built for wearable point-of-care diagnostics, and learned about our microneedling project designed to work alongside the arrays.
  • At the bench, I characterised the signal across physiological conditions on the bench and documented how different fabrication protocols affected the results.
A gloved hand holding a syringe over a flexible electrode array, its five leads taped down to the bench with yellow tape
Fabrication of sensors: carefully applying silver epoxy onto Polyimide.
Ben in gloves in the Sonkusale lab, with the bench behind him: a probe station, reagent bottles, tools and finished arrays
Average day in the lab

Domain

Flexible bioelectronics for wearable, point-of-care diagnostics

At a glance

An overview of everything I've done so far. Click into the links for more detail.

Studying

Tufts University, class of 2028BA Computer Science, focus in Biological Sciences. Rising junior.
Dean's List, 3.9 GPAEvery semester so far.

Research

Mass General, Vaccine & Immunotherapy CenterA Python pipeline that identifies immune cell populations, on datasets of over a million cells.
Sonkusale Research LabsFabrication protocols the group can repeat, from benchtop signal characterisation.
The full research page

Projects

CraveCastPredicts high-risk windows for people in recovery. Offline, live, open source.
TCP echo serverServes many clients at once, one thread per connection. C++ on raw POSIX sockets.
gerpSearches a whole directory tree for a word instantly. C++, hand-built hash index.
TRACEReads a photo of a meal for allergens and alerts you of likelihood.
The full projects page

Also

Tufts Technology ServicesResearch computing requests in one place, and a request workflow eliminating wait times for 500+ daily users and researchers.
Teaching and buildingPython workshops for thirty-odd students, and an L1 certification rocket that flew.
More on the about page

Reach me at silverbenh1@gmail.com

Download resume Contact
At a glance