Aravinda Chakravarti, Ph.D., is a human geneticist and a computational biologist renowned for his studies of predisposing genetic factors in complex human diseases as diabetes, heart disease and mental illness. Dr. Chakravarti is the Director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Chakravarti's research interests have concentrated on common diseases that arise from a combination of genetic and non-genetic factors. Because these diseases also involve usually tiny alterations in genes that encode proteins within very specific pathways, Chakravarti has investigated the complex interactions among these proteins by developing and applying genomic and computer-based means of finding and identifying these multiple genes. Dr. Chakravarti serves as Principal Investigator for Project 4: Genomic Determinants of Sudden Cardiac Death in the Donald W. Reynolds Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center. Under his leadership, this project will focus on identifying coding and regulatory gene variation that contributes to SCD risk in patients with atherosclerotic disease using novel array technologies.
A past associate editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics, Chakravarti is one of the Editors-in-Chief of Genome Research, and serves on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of numerous national and international journals, boards and societies. He is a past member of the NIH National Advisory Council of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Chaired the NIH Subcommittee on the 3rd 5-year Genome Project Plan, and continues to serve on several NIH panels.
His recent publications include:
- Carrasquillo MM, McCallion AS, Puffenberger EG, Kashuk CS, Nouri N, Chakravarti A: Genome-wide association study and mouse model identify interaction between RET and EDNRB pathways in Hirschsprung disease. Nature Genetics 32:237-244, 2002.
- Weder AB, Delgado MC, Zhu X, Gleiberman L, Kan D, Chakravarti A: Erythrocyte Sodium-Lithium Countertransport and Blood Pressure: A Genome-Wide Linkage Study. Hypertension 41:842-846,2003.
- Peri S, Navarro JD,…46 authors, Chakravarti A, Pandey A: Development of a Human Protein Reference Database as an initial platform for approaching systems biology in humans. Genome Research 13:2363-2371, 2003.
- The International HapMap Consortium (includes A. Chakravarti): The International HapMap Project. Nature (in press), 2003.
