Danny Muzata
Danny Muzata is a PhD candidate based in Hyderabad, India, pursuing Data Sciences for Global Health, a program jointly offered by BITS Pilani and the One Health Trust.
Before pursuing his PhD, Mr. Muzata worked as an intern at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia and as a biomedical scientist at Arthur Davidson Children’s Hospital in Zambia.
His research combines computational biology and machine learning to tackle critical global health challenges, including antimalarial drug resistance. He uses reinforcement learning to study how malarial parasites’ proteins evolve within structural and functional limits, and advanced tools called graph neural networks to study how proteins and metabolites interact, causing changes in the parasite’s metabolism that may lead to drug resistance.
Mr. Muzata received a master’s degree in Tropical Infectious Diseases and Zoonoses from the University of Zambia in Lusaka, Zambia; a postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics from JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research in Mysore, and a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Zambia in Lusaka, Zambia.
His research interests include infectious diseases, data science for health, antimicrobial resistance, protein evolution, computational systems biology, graph-based deep learning, and artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery.
Danny’s project supervisors include:
Sasha Tulchinsky – One Health Trust
Ramanan Laxminarayan– One Health Trust
Prof. Prajna Upadhyay-BITS Pilani
Prof. Sourav Chowdhury -BITS Pilani
Publications:
Sanyal, Dwipanjan, Danny Muzata, Vladimir N Uversky, Surender Kharbanda, Sourav Chowdhury, and Ravi Jasuja. 2025b. “Effects of Mutations on MUC1-C/ED Protein Stability and Antibody Binding: Structural Insight.” Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 775 (May): 152114. Available here.
- Sanyal, Dwipanjan A. Shivram, Deeptanshu Pandey, Suharto Banerjee, Vladimir N. Uversky, Danny Muzata, Aneesh Sreevallabh Chivukula, Ravi Jasuja, Krishnananda Chattopadhyay and Sourav Chowdhury. 2025b. “Mapping Dihydropteroate Synthase Evolvability Through Identification of a Novel Evolutionarily Critical Substructure.” International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, April, 143325. Available here.
