I am a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Greg Gibson at Georgia Tech.  

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My research focus has been on developing integrative genomic approaches and utilizing concepts from statistical genetics to assess risk of human disease and its evolution with environmental and lifestyle changes. I am interested to study the interactions between genetics and environment and how the rapid cultural changes of the modern environment influence the genetic variation and thereby disease susceptibility. The goal is to identify what the underlying drivers to inter-individual variability are leading to variation in disease risk and outcomes. My motivation to pursue these problems is drawn from two important reasons: 1) global surge in prevalence of most non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and inflammatory bowel disease over the course of 20th century owing to changes in environment and lifestyle; 2) potential to advance personalized genomic medicine, which can tailor therapies specific to each individual’s genetics, environment and ancestry. In this pursuit, I studied the interactions between polygenic risk and unhealthy exposures and how they exacerbate the risk of common diseases and complex traits in a large biobank-scale dataset.

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Additionally, I have also assessed the variable contribution of common and rare genetic variation in rare conditions like Sarcoma cancer. In another study, I computed the ancestry specific genetic effects on inflammatory bowel disease risk for Europeans and understudied African American populations, and demonstrated how the transferability of polygenic risk scores can be improved across populations.

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My work also extends to clinical genomics, particularly stratification of disease risk and progression. Towards this goal, I worked on developing a tissue specific predicted-transcriptional risk score built with the integration of transcriptomic and genetic data, to stratify progression to colectomy in ulcerative colitis.

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PMID: 32867542,32867542

PMID: 33600772