Dr. Srilakshmi (Sri) Raj is a population geneticist who aims to understand why disease risk varies among individuals and ethnically diverse populations. She investigates environmental-context dependent genetic variation and how it can be used to understand and predict complex disease in different global populations.
Dr. Raj is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Montefiore-Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center. She started there in 2021, from her previous position as a Research Associate and former NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NIH-NRSA) post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University, supervised by Professor Andrew G. Clark and Dr. Prabhu Pingali at the Tata Cornell Institute. She is also a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Genetics, mentored by Professor Sarah Tishkoff and holds an adjunct appointment at the Centre for Human Genetics in Bangalore, India. Dr. Raj worked as a research assistant at Harvard Medical School with Professor Frederick Ausubel, completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford and her Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge with Dr. Toomas Kivisild, with the support of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Tata Foundation.