Aravinda Chakravarti, PhD, a nationally renowned geneticist, will join the faculty of NYU Langone Health on April 2 as director of its new Center for Human Genetics and Genomics.

Prior to joining NYU Langone, Dr. Chakravarti served since 2000 as director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and since 2007 as director of the Center for Complex Disease Genomics.

“I am very excited to join NYU Langone Health and NYU School of Medicine because of their genuine and growing determination to improve medicine through great science,” says Dr. Chakravarti. “That, along with the chance to work so closely with world-leading geneticists and computational biologists, at NYU Langone and across the city, was too good of an opportunity to miss.”

The newly founded Center for Human Genetics and Genomics will partner with NYU Langone’s Institute for Systems Genetics, led by Jef Boeke, PhD, and its Institute for Computational Medicine, led by Itai Yanai, PhD, to experimentally understand and computationally model human disorders using genome-wide tools and perspectives. This improved understanding of the genetic science of disease promises to lead to new, targeted treatments, says Dr. Chakravarti.

The center will be multidisciplinary and represents a commitment to building capabilities in the field of human genetics and genomics across disciplines, says Dr. Chakravarti. It will work closely with many clinical departments at NYU Langone—including Medicine, Neurology, Pediatrics, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Psychiatry—as well with its Perlmutter Cancer Center.

“The alignment of Dr. Chakravarti’s interests with those of the strong research community at NYU Langone promises to deliver significant advances in our understanding of the genetic and genomic underpinnings of complex diseases,” says Dafna Bar-Sagi, PhD, senior vice president and vice dean for science and chief scientific officer at NYU Langone Health.

Dr. Chakravarti’s work is rooted in understanding how genes vary from person to person, and in how genetic mechanisms, functional and evolutionary, determine disease susceptibility and onset. He has already made important contributions to the understanding of the causes of several diseases using genome-wide association, or GWAS, studies, which link small genetic variations in key genes and their regulators to disease risk in individuals. His work has also focused on rare disorders—Hirschsprung disease, for example—that arise from fewer genetic causes than, but provide insights into, more complex, common conditions.

“The ingredients for a successful human genetics center are brilliant people, access to powerful experimental technologies, freedom to test unconventional ideas, and access to human subjects so that we can understand disease genesis and course,” says Dr. Chakravarti. “All these elements have come together at NYU Langone Health, and I look forward to the next phase of study in human genetics, which is special because we study human beings, not just their DNA.”

He will be joined at NYU Langone Health by his wife, Shukti Chakravarti, PhD, who will lead the basic science division of the Department of Ophthalmology.

About Dr. Chakravarti

Dr. Chakravarti received his bachelor of statistics degree with honors from the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta in 1974, with multiple minors. He earned his doctorate in human genetics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 1979.

He has held faculty positions in the departments of Biostatistics, Human Genetics, and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh from 1980 to 1993, and served as the James H. Jewell Professor in the Department of Genetics at Case Western Reserve University from 1993 to 2000. In that year he became the inaugural director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Chakravarti has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2015, the National Academy of Medicine since 2007, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2014. Over the years he has received many honors and awards, including the William Allan Award from the American Society of Human Genetics, the Chen Award from the Human Genome Organization, and a MERIT award from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. He has also served on numerous committees and review boards for the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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