Engineering
Nihal Pai
I build products that make complex technical systems easier to understand and use.
Former Senior Software Engineer at the Broad Institute with six years of experience building data-intensive healthcare and genomics platforms. Now pursuing Northwestern's MMM dual degree, an MBA and MS in Design Innovation.
Connected capabilities
Product + Design
Understand the problem
Users, workflows, requirements, interaction.Business
Understand the decision
Priorities, tradeoffs, value, scale.Selected work
Systems thinking, made tangible.
Selected work from six years building data-intensive healthcare and genomics products, from platform infrastructure and clinical data pipelines to configurable patient-support workflows and interface design.
Building reusable infrastructure across genomics programs
Over five years on the Broad Institute's Genomics Platform, I built software connecting laboratory activity, genomic processing, quality controls, and data delivery across multiple clinical and research programs.
- Scope
- 5+ programs
- Progression
- Engineer → Senior Engineer
- Ownership
- Led core implementation
Building the operational path from genomic result to clinical reporting
Developed data-pipeline infrastructure for result processing, quality checks, and clinical reporting within an NIH-funded study of genetic risk across ten chronic conditions.
- Program scale
- 155K+ results
- Participants
- 25K+
- Network
- 10 clinical sites
Turning care protocols into configurable product behavior
Translated nurse protocols and medication-program requirements into full-stack workflows for a digital patient-adherence platform.
- Scope
- 4+ client programs
- Ownership
- Full-stack workflows
- Domain
- Patient adherence
Designing a clearer visual language for clinical data
Designed health-analytics dashboard concepts and patient-onboarding interfaces during Techstars' UnitedHealthcare accelerator, creating consistent patterns across the work.
- Deliverables
- Dashboards + onboarding
- Output
- Cohesive visual concepts
- Context
- Techstars accelerator
The work in context
One platform, multiple programs.
eMERGE and COVID-19 were programs supported while I worked within the Broad Institute's Genomics Platform. Shared capabilities connected distinct clinical and research needs to reliable software infrastructure.
Broad Institute
Genomics Platform
eMERGE
COVID-19
Other clinical &
research programs
research programs
OnboardingValidationDeliveryOrchestration
Shared platform capabilities
Working model
How I work
A practical loop for problems that span software, workflows, people, and decisions.
- 01
Understand the system
Architecture, constraints, data, dependencies.
- 02
Understand the human
Users, workflows, pain points, incentives.
- 03
Work through the tradeoffs
Scope, feasibility, priorities, value.
- 04
Build and learn
Prototype, ship, observe, improve.
About
From building systems to shaping how they should work.
I started my career in software because I wanted to understand how complex systems worked. At the Broad Institute, those systems sat inside equally complex laboratory, clinical, and operational environments.
Over time, the questions around the code became as interesting as the implementation itself: What problem are we actually solving? Where is the workflow breaking down? Which behavior belongs in reusable infrastructure? Which tradeoff matters most?
I'm now pursuing Northwestern's MMM joint degree, combining an MBA and MS in Design Innovation. The program is helping me deepen that perspective across product, design, and business.
More about mePlay
Things I make to understand things.
Music, earlier interface work, data visualization, and coding experiments: the lower-stakes work that keeps curiosity active.
- Sound
- Interfaces
- Graphics
- Experiments