Dharini is a PhD student working on multimodal ophthalmic image analysis, development of agentic AI frameworks to streamline ophthalmic clinical workflows, and designing scalable and efficient deep-learning models for precise detection of surgical margins in cancer imaging.
Dharini is particulary focused on radiomic analysis of multimodal opthalmic images for early identification of systemic diseases, as well as development of explainable deep-learning models for precise tumor segmentation and margin assessment in pathology.
An additional area of interest is fusion of data from multiple modalities to identify key biomarkers for early identification of cognitive disorders and developing robust image-quality control pipelines to ensure generalizable AI across multi-center datasets.
Prior to joining the Madabhushi Lab, Dharini was a graduate student researcher in the ViTAL Lab of Georgia Tech & Emory University School of Medicine, for which she built patient‐centric multimodal wearable and ambient‐sensor systems to quantify digital biomarkers of functional MCI in older adults; and developed an end‐to‐end, bias‐aware explainable AI framework using IMU data to longitudinally predict MoCA and Mini-BESTest scores, reducing demographic disparities by 50%.
She also was a machine learning research engineer for AI & Robotics Technology Park at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). There she developed a zero‐shot 6D pose‐estimation framework for mobile robots using fixed ambient cameras, combining visual and semantic descriptors to improve RTAB-Map SLAM localization by 63%; and created a scalable perception framework for localizing and tracking autonomous robots with fixed monocular cameras, leveraging epistemic‐uncertainty modeling to optimize camera placement.
Dharini is pursuing a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and earned a bachelor of engineering degree in electronics and communication from Ramaiah Institute of Technology in India. She has been selected for the 2025 Female Founders Summer Cohort at Georgia Tech.
An expert hacker, Dharini won the MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack 2025 (Assistive Technology Track) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earning special prizes from Google Health and Niraj Bhatia Foundation for the most impactful solution. She also won the HMT SURGE Hackathon 2022 organized by the IISc, Ministry of Heavy Industries of India.
As an undergraduate, she received the Merit Award (Silver Medal) for exemplary undergraduate academic performance from Ramaiah Institute of Technology and the Best Project Award 2023 from Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and Ramaiah Institute of Technology (Class of 2023) for the best undergraduate capstone project. She also earned the Best Achiever Award (Class of 2023) for distinguished performance in academics, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities from Ramaiah Institute of Technology.
She also was selected for the MITACS Globalink Research Internship in 2022 for a fully funded research internship at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada; a Summer Research Fellowship in 2021 awarded by the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) for a fully-funded research internship at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc); and the Avery Dennison Spirit of Invention Scholarhip in 2021 for pitching an innovative idea with a great societal impact.