Wednesday, December 4, 2019
6:00 to 8:00 pm
The Faculty Club
One Bannister Street
Biography
Sohini Ramachandran joined the faculty of Brown University in July 2010, after spending three years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Professor John Wakeley’s group at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She completed her PhD in 2007 with Professor Marcus Feldman at Stanford University’s Department of Biological Sciences. Her research has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, as a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, and as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. In 2019, Sohini was a Natural Sciences Programme Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, and was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (nominated by the NIH).
At Brown University, Sohini serves as Director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, and oversees an NIH-funded Predoctoral Training Program in Biological Data Science along with three colleagues from CCMB and the Data Science Initiative. She was also named a Henry Merritt Wriston Fellow in 2016. Sohini was drawn to Brown’s faculty in part due to the University’s commitment to mentoring young researchers: Sohini’s own scientific career began as a high school researcher, winning fourth place nationally in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
The initial draft sequence of the human genome, published in 2001, promised to usher the world towards personalized medicine, in which a patient's genome is used to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Almost twenty years later, many clinically actionable mutations have been identified and are incorporated into treatment, and medical genomics offers exciting opportunities for data-driven discoveries about the genomic underpinnings of health. As increasingly large genomic datasets merged with medical records become available to researchers and the public turns to direct-to-consumer companies for genomic analysis, challenging humanistic issues surrounding privacy, preexisting conditions, ancestry, and kinship abound. As a human population geneticist, I study the evolutionary forces that produce and maintain genetic variation in our species. I'll describe some of my laboratory's latest work in medical genomics, in which we characterize the prevalence and phenotypic consequences of uniparental disomy using 4 million individuals in the 23andMe Inc. customer database. I'll then describe a series of fundamental challenges for making personalized medicine a reality for individuals of non-European and/or mixed ancestry.