NAME
Drshika Asher (she/they)
SYNOPSIS
Industry:
NCSA [Research SWE][2024]
MongoDB [SWE Intern][2023]
Uber [SWE Intern][2023]
Cargill [SWE Intern][2022]
EnterpriseWorks [Front-End Intern][2021]
Education: UIUC, B.S. Computer Science [2024]
Research:
Microsoft Research Redmond [Undergrad Research Intern][2022]
Social CompUting LaBoratory (SCUBA) [Research Intern][2021][2022]
Human Computer Interaction Lab [Research Intern][2022]
DESCRIPTION
Hey, I’m Drshika! I’m a Research Software Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and the city holds such a special place in my heart that I have a Spotify playlist dedicated to it.
I’m also a proud UIUC Alum, ILL! During college, I was involved with a lot of undergraduate research, head TA-ships (or as the CS department at UIUC calls them, CA-ships) and club leadership. My studies and research were supported by scholarships from JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Cargill, Clare Boothe Luce Foundation and others. To add some spice to my life, I spent my senior year in college interning for Japan House where I whisked countless bowls of matcha and learned to dress in Yukata!
When I’m not coding, you can find me hosting elaborate parties, making new matcha drinks, choreographing dances or checking out the latest delicious restaurants in NYC.
NEWS
[August, 2026]
The Conversation covered how the Permafrost Discovery Gateway team is using AI to scan satellite imagery, helping map over 4 million lakes and 70 million thermokarst ponds across the Arctic! I led the engineering of the interactive data portal and PMTiles-based visualization pipeline that powers this near-real-time thaw tracking, enabling communities and researchers to explore drainage events pan-Arctic-wide. Read the article here. Additional coverage: EurekAlert!, Fortune, Arctic Today, Phys.org, Alaska Beacon, Center for Data Innovation.
[June, 2026]
Our work on Illinois Chat was accepted as a poster presentation at the 2026 Mayo Clinic AI Research Summit! The poster—”Illinois Chat: A Knowledge-Augmented AI Platform: Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Ontologies, Knowledge Graphs, and LLM-Guided Retrieval for Biomedical AI”—showcases how extending traditional RAG with biomedical knowledge graphs, ontologies, and iterative LLM-guided retrieval produces grounded, cited responses. For this retrieval flow, I built the KG-RAG step and integrated it into Illinois Chat. Check out the summit poster listings here.
[May, 2026]
The House Select Committee on China voiced support for NSF’s reforms to strengthen security across its supercomputing programs. To support this policy shift, I executed extensive SQL data migrations and backend codebase updates across the ACCESS Cyberinfrastructure platform to restrict international access and offboard user accounts under tight deadlines. Read the press release here.
WRITING
Corporate Swag Ranked by Someone Who Has Too Many Water Bottles [January, 2026]
For each item, I will rank the item by novelty and price on a scale of 0/5, where: Price: This is to get the lowest viable quality level of the…
Creating Jekyll Skins with Sass 1.80.0 [January, 2025]
When I first started writing the code for this website, I had cobbled together styles from Cayman, Rouge and a good amount of Coolors to iterate on the color schemes….
What’s on my Mac? [October, 2024]
So, people have been asking me to write this because I have an entire workflow system that I can’t live without. My setup isn’t necessarily complicated or advanced, but I…
RESEARCH
OVER-TRUST IN AUTOMATED SYSTEMS, UIUC HCI LAB [2022]
Mentors: Prof. Alex Kirlik and Sebastian Rodriguez. I worked with the UIUC Human-Computer Interaction lab on a project about embodied agents in the context of trust, performance, and embodiment in a physical VR task. I contributed ideas in terms of shaping experimental design, researched and analyzed papers to the review of literature and helped design the VR game itself by programming in C# and Unity. I also dry ran the experiment with peers until it was ready to execute at a larger scale.
CLASSIFYING AUDIO-SOCIAL PLATFORMS,SCuBa LAB [2021]
Mentors: Prof. Eshwar Chandrashekaran and Tanvi Bajpai. I investigated the structure and norms of the voice based platform Clubhouse and documented the different forms of abuse on voice based platforms like Twitter Spaces, Discord Stages as well as Spotify Greenroom. We analyzed these trends using Natural Language Processing techniques like LDA and SAGE. See my talk from the virtual REU poster session here
PUBLICATIONS
Illinois Chat: A Knowledge-Augmented AI Platform: Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Ontologies, Knowledge Graphs, and LLM-Guided Retrieval for Biomedical AI
Volodymyr Kindratenko, Rohan Marwaha, Drshika Asher, Luke Russell, Patrycja Lech (accepted poster, Mayo Clinic AI Research Summit 2026) [site] [program]
Validating trust in human-robot interaction through virtual reality: Comparing embodied and “behind-the-screen” interactions
Sebastian Rodriguez, Harsh Deep, Drshika Asher, James Schaffer, Alex Kirlik, USA (accepted, AHFE 2023) [arxiv]
Harmonizing the Cacophony: An Affordance-aware Framework of Audio-Based Social Platform Moderation
Tanvi Bajpai, Drshika Asher, Anwesa Goswami, and Eshwar Chandrasekharan
Preprint, July 2021. (accepted, ACM CSCW 2022) [arXiv]
INDUSTRY
NATIONAL CENTER FOR SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATIONS (NCSA), Research Software Engineer [2024 - Present]
Research Software Engineer currently funded by COMBINI (NIH) and Permafrost Discovery Gateway (Google). Former projects: ACCESS, Cropwizard, Illinois.chat HIPO, Vyriad. Contributions are mostly open source on github. [Ruby][Kubernetes][Python][React][Neo4j][Next][Flask][Slurm][Docker][PostgreSQL]
MONGODB, Software Engineering Intern [2023]
Database Experience - Rust Driver Team. See my work on Github. [Rust]
UBER, Software Engineering Intern [2023]
Membership Platform Team [Go]
CARGILL, Software Engineering Intern [2022]
Cargill Digital Innovation Lab. [React][TailwindCSS]
ENTERPRISEWORKS, Front-End Developer [2021]
Research Park. [HTML][CSS][JS][PHP]
SERVICE & TEACHING
teaching (* == admin/head course assistant (CA))
CS225: DATA STRUCTURES[SP2022][FA2022*]
Data Structures and Algorithms in C++. With G. Carl Evans and Brad Solomon.
[0] Exam 1 Review Guide
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[1] Exam 2 Review Guide
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[2] Exam 3 Review Guide
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CS196: COMPUTER SCIENCE HONORS [SP2021*][FA2021]
Project Manager & Head of Social.
[0] Kotlin Slides
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service
Girls Who Code [2025]
Ran Girls Who Code club in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library. Created lesson plans and taught classes on web development basics using HTML/CSS and robotics basics using Python.
NCWIT ASPIRATIONS IN COMPUTING REGIONAL ORGANIZER [2022][2023][2024][2025]
Reviewed applications for the NCWIT AiC award and lead the organization of the AiC award Ceremony for the Central Illinois Affiliate for three years. Currently reviewing applications for the NYC Affiliate.
ILLINOIS CS STARS RESEARCH FELLOW [2021-22]
Worked on recruiting, mentorship and cohort-building activities like Hour of Code, ChicTech, Trick or Research and Admitted Women’s outreach.
EXTRAS
[0] I’m in the top .01% of listeners for Chloe X Halle
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[1] I like to build mechanical keyboards! I use the rk68 with gat milky yellows
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[2] My favorite foods are lychee and basil pesto pasta
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[3] My favorite shows are Ted Lasso, Parks and Recreation and Frieren
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[4] Here’s a picture of me!
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