Rate My Professor Arun Durvasula

Arun Durvasula, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Quantitative and Computational Biology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He joined the Center for Genetic Epidemiology and Department of Population and Public Health Sciences in 2023, following a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard University. Durvasula completed his PhD in Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021 as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2018-2021). He holds a B.S. in Biotechnology from the University of California, Davis. As principal investigator of the Durvasula Lab, he leads research on the genetic basis of complex traits and evolutionary forces shaping genetic variation.

Durvasula's research develops statistical tools to analyze large genomic datasets, exploring how genetic variation drives complex diseases, gene-environment interactions, polygenic risk scores, archaic introgression, natural selection, and population history. He examines evolutionary influences on disease-causing mutations within and across populations. His achievements include the National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award (2025-2030), American Society of Human Genetics Charles J. Epstein Trainee Award semi-finalist (2023), Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award (2021), and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2018-2021). Key publications encompass 'Natural selection interacts with recombination to shape the evolution of hybrid genomes' (Science, 2018), 'African genomes illuminate the early history and transition to selfing in Arabidopsis thaliana' (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017), 'Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations' (Science Advances, 2020), 'Negative selection on complex traits limits phenotype prediction accuracy between populations' (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2021), 'Age-dependent topic modeling of comorbidities in UK Biobank identifies disease subtypes with differential genetic risk' (Nature Genetics, 2023), 'The lingering effects of Neanderthal introgression on human complex traits' (eLife, 2023), 'Insufficient Evidence for a Severe Bottleneck in Humans During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition' (Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2025), and 'Distinct explanations underlie gene-environment interactions in the UK Biobank' (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2025). His work advances population genetics and evolutionary genomics.