I first met Ashish in 2013, when I was considering moving to Atlanta. Ashish, typically, struck me as a fountain of information, and his enthusiasm certainly helped sway me to join the community at Emory and Georgia Tech. 

Ahish was the commensurate collaborative colleague, who also seemed to be running much of the mechanics of the department. It was not until 2017, when I took over as Chair, that I realised just how much he was doing.

Not only was he single-handedly keeping our essential PhD program together, but he was the driving force behind our computing infrastructure. On top of this he had an enormous and active research portfolio. It was no surprise to me that he was also bringing in most of the research funding in the department. As you can imagine, a large proportion of this was devoted to supporting others. He was always willing to be the backbone of any project, and was the commensurate team researcher. He supported many nationally important initiatives, such as the National Cancer Imaging Archive (*). One memorable partnership for our department was the collaboration with another of our faculty,  Shamim Nemati, to predict sepsis in the intensive care unit. This work was soon award over $1m to rapidly spin up a solution to implement a machine learning solution in the healthcare system. 

Google was so impressed with the work Ashish and his collaborators were doing, it sent a film crew to document and interview the team. Ashish featured prominently in this, as you can see from this link: https://youtu.be/5NVvIv53MUk

This work is now in several hospitals in the US and continues to grow. Ashish’s legacy will continue to benefit society long into the future. 

Ashish was the best leadership partner I could have hoped for, but more  importantly, he was a good friend, never failing to think of others at every stage. In recent times he would text me to check up on how I was feeling and whether my minor back or knee injuries were improving! He hosted faculty meetings from his back porch among the chickens, and took up new hobbies, turning the photos I sent him into digital art. He never lost his sense of humor,  grace and kindness. I miss him enormously, but am so grateful for the time I was lucky enough to spend with him.  

(*) In February, during the NCI imaging webinar the imaging community remembered Ashish. Please find the recording on this page:  https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/NICC. Scroll down to the “Presentations & Recordings of previous webinars” section. Bob Nordstrom from the Cancer Imaging Program spoke about Ashish’s accomplishments.