Biography

Towfique Raj, Ph.D., is a core faculty member in the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Genetics and Genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Raj is a Co-Director of Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center Genomics Core Dr. Raj received his Ph.D. in genetics from Cambridge University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Raj was an instructor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Raj received the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Service Award and the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer's Disease Award.

His research group uses powerful computational and experimental tools for genetic research and interdisciplinary approaches to understand the genetic factors driving neurodegenerative diseases with the ultimate goal of finding a cure. More recently, Dr. Raj's group is interested in linking genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease to detectable changes in innate immune cells that may contribute to disease progression. A major direction of his laboratory has been to understand the role of peripheral immune cells in neurodegenerative disease pathogenesis (see the MyND study). His group is leading efforts to set up human cohorts for deep multi-omics profiling of immune cells. His long-term interest is to translate findings from these studies to potentially identify novel immune therapeutic targets and biomarkers.

Links

https://rajlab.org
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21115973