Risha has a BSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Auckland (NZ), an MSc in Applied Bioinformatics from Cranfield University (UK), and a PhD in Health Informatics from King’s College London (UK). In 2010, Risha completed her MSc and joined an epigenomics lab at the University of Cambridge as a bioinformatician. Her responsibilities included analysing high-throughput genomic next-generation sequencing (NGS) data to study gene-silencing. She also led the development of the ADDAPTS (A Data-Driven Automated Pipeline and Tracking System) software.

In 2014, Risha was part of a team that was recruited to set up a clinical diagnosis lab for inherited heart conditions at Royal Brompton Hospital. Risha was the lead developer for implementing the NGS annotation and mutation detection analysis pipeline. She contributed to the development of cardioclassifier.org. Risha also contributed to the cardiogenetic research and published several papers. As an informatician based in a clinical setting, she became interested in involving electronics health record in research. This led her to pursue a PhD in this subject.

In 2022, Risha completed her PhD at the IoPPN, King’s College London. Her PhD thesis was on investigating clozapine health outcomes using electronic health records. All the research was performed using CRIS data, the de-identified electronic health records of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM). After completing her PhD, she joined the CRIS team as a Senior Clinical Informatician. In her current role, her responsibilities include working closely with clinical academics, clinical leads and other informaticians, defining and developing detailed specifications and performing the informatics-heavy tasks for answering clinical and research questions from CRIS.