Seyedeh Maryam Zekavat

Maryam graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Biological Engineering. During her undergraduate experience one of her key experiences was traveling to Switzerland and engaging in research at Roche where she developed a mathematical model of cholesterol dynamics in the outer retina to understand the pathogenesis of dry age-related macular degeneration, a blinding disease.

After graduation, Maryam worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the Kathiresan Lab as a Computational Biologist. Her key research contribution during this period was performing the first comprehensive deep whole-genome sequencing analyses on 1) conventional blood lipids, 2) lipoprotein(a), and 3) early-onset myocardial infarction. She also engaged in whole exome sequencing analyses, using rare variant burden analyses to discover new genes associated with myocardial infarction.

Maryam is currently an MD/PhD student at Yale, pursuing an MD and a PhD in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, co-mentored by Hongyu Zhao and Pradeep Natarajan. Her research combines germline and somatic genomics with deep phenotyping to discover and understand the causal factors of disease.