Kushal Kolar is a PhD candidate and engineer with a decade of experience at the intersection of neuroscience and scientific software, currently developing GPU-accelerated visualization and numerical kernels for large-scale neuronal calcium and voltage imaging at NYU Tandon. He has a strong open-source track record—contributing serialization and model-saving features to tslearn for time-series ML and co-developing fastplotlib for high-dimensional GPU plotting—making complex analysis pipelines more reproducible and performant. Previously he built and released analysis tools for neural imaging and behavior at the Michael Sars Centre and contributed automated behavior-analysis tooling at EMBL. Kushal blends deep domain expertise in neurobiology with practical systems-level engineering across the Python data stack, and often optimizes low-level numerical code to unlock faster discovery workflows.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Bachelor of Science, Neuroscience & Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science, Neuroscience & Biochemistry at The University of British Columbia
The machine learning toolkit for time series analysis in Python
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
Contributions:22 commits, 4 PRs, 42 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Kushal primarily contributed to the serialization and model saving capabilities of the `tslearn` library, particularly for machine learning models related to time series analysis. They added serialization support for the `GlobalAlignmentKernelKMeans`, `TimeSeriesKMeans`, `KShape`, `KNeighborsTimeSeries` and `KNeighborsTimeSeriesClassifier`, `PiecewiseAggregateApproximation`, and `SymbolicAggregateApproximation` models, enabling models to be saved to various formats (HDF5, JSON, and pickle) and subsequently loaded. The commits also included tests to verify the correct serialization and deserialization of these models, ensuring reproducibility and usability of the trained models.
Computational toolbox for large scale Calcium Imaging Analysis, including movie handling, motion correction, source extraction, spike deconvolution and result visualization.
Contributions:1 PR, 32 pushes, 9 branches in 1 year 11 months
extractionpythondeconvolutionimagingimage-filters
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