Engineering
Nihal Pai
I build products that make complex technical systems easier to understand and use.
Former Senior Software Engineer at the Broad Institute. MBA + MS Design Innovation candidate in Northwestern University's MMM Program.
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.
Systems and products I've helped turn from complex workflows into reliable, usable experiences.
Building systems for genomics at scale
Within the Broad Institute's Genomics Platform, I built and evolved software capabilities connecting laboratory activity, genomic processing, quality controls, and downstream data delivery as part of a platform team supporting multiple clinical and research programs.
Explore Broad work5+clinical and research programs
Turning genomic risk results into clinical information
Built data-pipeline infrastructure for result processing, quality checks, and clinical reporting within an NIH-funded genomic-risk study.
Explore eMERGE155K+genetic risk results
25K+participants
10clinical sites
Encoding complex care protocols into guided workflows
Translated medication-program requirements and nurse protocols into configurable product workflows for a digital patient-adherence platform serving 4+ pharmaceutical clients.
Explore Human Care Systems4+pharmaceutical clients
Giving clinical data a usable visual language
Designed health-analytics dashboards and patient-onboarding interfaces during Techstars' UnitedHealthcare accelerator, creating a reusable visual system for communicating complex clinical data.
Explore TellescopeThe 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—an MBA and MS in Design Innovation—to 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