Debarka is an Professor of Computational Biology and Computer Science at IIIT-Delhi. He is also an honorary Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology-Brisbane. Debarka carried out his doctoral and post-doctoral research in the Machine Intelligence Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute and Genome Institute of Singapore, respectively. His group has been among the first to introduce big data algorithms in the field of single-cell genomics. He received INSPIRE faculty Award in 2015 by the Government of India. His lab invented and commercialized a panel of eleven platelet genes to track the early onset of cancer.