Mentor: Dr. Rajat M Gupta
Shamsudheen Vellarikkal was awarded his PhD in Genomics from the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi in 2017. During his PhD, he established a cohort to study rare genetic disorders. This cohort of patients and associated clinical network is known as GUaRDIAN (Genomics for Understanding Rare Diseases: India Alliance Network). This is the first and largest, rare disease research network in India. He completed a short postdoctoral fellowship (from 2017 to 2019) in the laboratory of Sekar Kathiresan (Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard). His work focused on genomic studies of common and rare variation in cardiovascular diseases.
Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Rajat Gupta. Dr. Vellarikkal was the first to report single cell technologies applied to cardiovascular cell types and identified significant cellular heterogeneity in the vasculature with this technique. His ongoing work seeks to clarify the functional consequences of cellular heterogeneity in states such as aging and atherosclerosis, with the aim of understanding new genetic mechanisms of disease.
Keywords
- Single Cell Technologies
- Molecular Genetics
- Bioinformatics
- High throughput screening
- Statistical Genetics