Profile of Aravinda Chakravarti

Abstract

Many of the genetic variations uncovered by genome-wide dragnets are bycatch, not primary disease culprits. Separating causality from coincidence in this sea of data is challenging, especially when many of the candidates do not reside in the coding portion of the genome. Aravinda Chakravarti, director of New York University’s Center for Human Genetics and Genomics, has made a career of not just cutting through the noise but anticipating it, thanks to his training in statistics and genetics. In his Inaugural Article, Chakravarti, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, outlines a systematic process for determining causality in genome-wide association studies. He examines variants of regulatory elements that control gene expression by focusing on variation in cis -regulatory elements that target the SCN5A gene, which is implicated in sudden cardiac death (1). Aravinda Chakravarti. Image courtesy of Sumantra Chatterjee (New York University School of Medicine, New York). Born in Calcutta, India in 1954, just seven years after the country gained independence, Chakravarti remembers a mood of optimism and a sense of possibility. “I grew up in India at a very magical time.” Only in hindsight would Chakravarti call his family’s financial circumstances poor. “I had every kind of material to read, from national newspapers to glossy magazines to books,” he says. “I grew up in a house where reading was very valued, and curiosity was valued.” Chakravarti attended a local high school run by Methodist missionaries that offered advanced science courses. After high school, Chakravarti applied to a plethora of colleges. “I don’t know that I had a particular sense of direction,” he says. That changed as soon as Chakravarti saw the first page of the Indian Statistical Institute’s entrance examination, which contained two 10-digit numbers. The question asked which of five possible answers resulted from …