Muralidharan Sargurupremraj, PhD

Assistant Professor

Personal Statement:

Muralidharan Sargurupremraj, PhD, is a geneticist with both statistical and molecular biology experience. Dr. Sargurupremraj is an active member of several large-scale consortiums and lead multiple projects generating primary genetic association evidence for complex neurological, neurodegenerative diseases and their various endophenotypes (white matter hyperintensities, brain infarcts, memory performance, etc.). His specific interest is studying the vascular contribution to Alzheimer’s disease – a common form of dementia that often co-exists with cerebrovascular disease. He is involved in the systematic exploration for biological pleiotropy and causal inference using instrumental variable methods with a specific focus on gene prioritization strategies for augmenting the performance of disease-risk prediction that is based on common genetic variants. Dr. Sargurupremraj is also experienced in the application of multi-omics data to infer cell/tissue type specificity in cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) both at the bulk and single-cell resolution. His renewed interest is in studying gene-environment interaction by involving epigenetic information and a specific class of genetic elements that transpose in the genome using robust statistical methods particularly in relation to the magnetic resonance imaging markers for cSVD and atrophy.