I met Ashish in November 2018, when I joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory as a researcher.

Not too long after joining the department, I started working on a large, ongoing project, and it was starting to go off the rails. We were approaching a deadline and realized that we didn’t have the key infrastructure that we needed, so Ashish swooped in to develop the infrastructure and to help get the project back on track. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was, in many ways, characteristic of who Ashish was.

I worked with him over the coming months, and I learned as much about project management as I did about the project. Ashish kept his eye on both the big picture and the various details. He led people, but he was also hands-on, and he somehow made time to do both. He appreciated and recognized clever ideas, but he wasn’t distracted by them. I couldn’t help but want to learn from him.

The project progressed, and my life progressed, and I started a family. I remember my first time coming back to work maybe a month or so after becoming a father. I don’t remember much about it because of sleep deprivation, but I remember talking to Ashish. I remember that he was so excited he was for me, and so supportive, reassuring, and funny, and it meant so much to me. It was that moment and moments like them that made me sure that I was in the right place and with the right people.

Ashish and I started working together on our department’s education program shortly before his diagnosis. At one point, he was recruiting a PhD student, and called me a week or two before she was planning to visit campus to ask me to take over her visit. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the start of his diagnosis, and he knew that he might not be available for her. Even then, he thought of this student and wanted to make sure that she was taken care of.

Ashish was brilliant, kind, selfless, and unbelievably funny.  I think that this last part, his incredible sense of humor, is worth emphasizing because the past few years, when he was ill and the world was upside-down, were not been particularly funny, but Ashish still found humor where he could.