Pushkar Ghanekar
scientist · builder · epicure
Welcome to my personal website. It is good to have you! I am passionate about science and technology to improve our lives.
In my day-to-day I use science, data, and AI systems to design better medicine at Lilly. I lead Frontier AI at Lilly, a boutique group I built from scratch that works at the intersection of lab automation, AI agents, and molecule discovery.
I earned my Ph.D. at Purdue University with Prof. Jeffrey Greeley, where I studied atomistic simulations and how to model energy storage and conversion systems. I am interested in how medicines are discovered, developed, and commercialized—and in the tools that make that work more creative.
Outside work, I enjoy cooking, gaming, history, philosophy, and longer-than-necessary bike rides. I also keep a data science blog for notes on life science, algorithms, and code.
Writing helps me work out what I think. Some of those thoughts live here.
Life updates
- Started building Frontier AI, a team focused on scientific AI platforms for accelerating therapeutic discovery.
- Joined Eli Lilly as a research scientist, focusing on cheminformatics.
- Completed my Ph.D. thesis defense at Purdue University.
- Presented graph-based machine-learning work at ACS Fall.
Principles I keep returning to
- Intentionality must precede application.
- How you do anything is how you do everything.
- Have strong convictions, loosely held.
- Follow curiosity and passion, not trends.
- Trust compounding and persistence: you do not need to be always right, just less stupid.