Hi, I’m Darsh.
I’m a high school student from Franklin, Tennessee. I spend a lot of my time on computational biology and Lumigenic.
I’m particularly interested in enzymes: how they work, how they evolved, and what we could make with them.
I also play fingerstyle guitar and lead a band called Chai & Strings. I like mountaineering, racquet sports, and pool.
You can reach me at darsh.shri123@gmail.com.
Ravenwood High School, Class of 2027
Lumigenic
I’m a founder of Lumigenic. We’re building next-generation foundation models and infrastructure for engineering catalytic systems.
We’ve raised $100k in pre-seed funding from 1517 Fund. Right now, I’m focused on building out the company and scaling it in order to build something consequential for humanity.
How I got into comp bio
I wanted to be a lawyer when I started high school & most of what I did in freshman year and the start of sophomore year was aimed at that.
However, after going through my first semester of sophomore year and continuing to participate in law-related activities (albeit less than satisfactory results), I realized I never had a passion for the field in the first place. I wanted to build creative things, pursue wild/fantastical ideas, and make things that positively impact all of society. The field of law (and the overall archetype of corporate life) simply felt constricting to me.
Around then, my sister was learning about CRISPR in her Biomed class and started walking me through the mechanics. The concept of gene editing felt so cool to me, and I wanted to both learn more and get my hands dirty with the tool.
That passion became my project for the Middle Tennessee Science and Engineering Fair (MTSEF), where I built GuideX, one of the first end-to-end CRISPR/Cas13 pipelines meant for exploring different ways to tackle cassava brown streak disease.
GuideX finds conserved regions in viral sequences, designs guide RNAs, and checks for off-target matches (the code’s available on my GitHub).
Our project at MTSEF
We won at MTSEF, and that continued passion led me to apply to iGEM’s Venture Foundry a couple months later and get in. That kickstarted my startup/entrepreneurial journey and led me to start Lumigenic Therapeutics, the original (agtech) company.
iGEM 2025 @ Paris w/ John Cumbers
Music
I’ve been teaching myself guitar since 2020. I play fingerstyle and percussive acoustic guitar.
Me @ 13 playing an arrangement of Kesariya for Global Musical Icon
I started Chai & Strings, the youth arm of Strange Curry. We arrange Indian and Western music and play shows around Nashville. I bring musicians together, put together set lists, and help with the arrangements.
We’ve played more than 20 shows, including at The Mockingbird Theatre and Plaza Mariachi.