Omar Chishti

Introduction

Omar Chishti (Urdu: عمر چشتی; born 10 December 1999) is an Indian information designer and researcher working in brain network analysis and scientific visualization.3 He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University (2022) and is currently pursuing graduate studies in artificial intelligence at Imperial College London.2 The surname Chishti is a toponym derived from a town in present-day Afghanistan, though the family connection to this town remains[citation needed] unclear.

Early Life and Education

Chishti was born in Delhi on 10 December 1999.a His childhood was spent on Indian Air Force stations across India, where his father served as a radar engineer and airfield lighting specialist. This resulted in frequent relocations during his formative years.

At age 12, Chishti began securing scholarships to fund his education.4 He attended the Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in Dehradun, from 2012 to 2018, where he was a member of Kashmir House and served on the editorial board of The Doon School Weekly.

In 2022, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Yale University.5 During his undergraduate studies, he participated in the Directed Studies program, an intensive sequence in philosophy, literature, and political thought. He received the Mike Dodge Prize for an essay on Aristotle's hylomorphic metaphysics, and published an essay on Socratic dialectic in Plato's Euthyphro in the Yale Historical Review.

Career

Following graduation, Chishti worked as a postgraduate research associate in the Department of Neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine (June 2022 – October 2023).6 His work focused on developing distributed computing pipelines for large-scale connectomics analysis and implementing probabilistic models for language cortex mapping.

From October 2023 to August 2025, he worked as a researcher with the Max Planck Society at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, conducting research in both Berlin and Paris on neural time-series analysis and automated lesion localization.

In 2025, Chishti moved to London to pursue an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London, expected to complete in August 2026.

Research and Creative Work

Scientific Research

Chishti's research focuses on the relationship between brain structure and function, particularly in connectomics and language network mapping.8

Publications include "Multitask language mapping to visualize spatial extent of polyfunctional language cortex" in Neurology (2025),13 and "Mapping the structure-function relationship along macroscale gradients in the human brain" in Nature Communications (2024).14 A complete list is available on Google Scholar.

Data Visualization and Illustration

Since 2022, Chishti has developed a portfolio of data visualizations spanning astronomical diagrams (Solar System, Phases of the Moon), biological illustrations (DNA Fractal, Feline Phylogeny), and network representations (Eloquent Pathways of the Human Brain).10 Many begin as hand-drawn calligraphic compositions before being digitized.

His visualization Eloquent Pathways of the Human Brain (2023) accompanied research published in Neurology. The Solar System visualization became his most widely shared work[citation needed] after circulating on social media in 2024. He has also developed educational tools, including an interactive white matter tract explorer used by students at Johns Hopkins.26

Writing

Chishti maintains a blog featuring essays on memory, creative process, and data visualization. Posts include Memory's Arches, on temporal experience, and Tools I Use for Creation, on his analog-to-digital workflow.

Personal Life

Family

Chishti's father is an Indian Air Force officer (retired) specializing in radar engineering. His mother is an English teacher who pursued doctoral studies in Mughal history. His sister completed a PhD in English Literature.15

In the year following graduation, Chishti lived with a Bengal cat named Zafran (Persian: زعفران, "saffron").

Interests

Chishti has maintained longstanding interests in creative writing, astronomy,17 calligraphy (particularly Gothic Fraktur), and modular origami.18 His favorite constellation is Orion, which he first observed at age five in Jodhpur.21

He maintains a curated playlist of minimal electronic music for deep work, available on Spotify. This accompanies The White Swan, the first installment in his notes from an unfinished novel series.16

Controversies

See Also

• Computational neuroscience
• Connectome
• Data visualization
• Brain mapping
• Imperial College London
• Yale University
• The Doon School
• Max Planck Society

Further Reading

• Chishti, O. (2025). Memory's Arches. Fanciful Meditation #1.
• Chishti, O. (2024). The White Swan [Edition 0]. With accompanying musical journey.
• Sporns, O. (2010). Networks of the Brain. MIT Press.
• Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
• Jaynes, J. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin.
• Bringhurst, R. (2004). The Elements of Typographic Style (3rd ed.). Hartley & Marks Publishers.
• Tufte, E. R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.). Graphics Press.

External Links

• Omar Chishti publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Personal research portfolio
• Data visualization gallery
• Interactive White Matter Tract Explorer