VinodScaria Vishwanath Cancer Care Foundation & Indian Institute of Technology KanpurIndia

Vinod Scaria is a clinician turned computational biologist. His research interests are in understanding the function, organization and regulation of vertebrate genomes, and how genomic variations could potentially impact them. He is the co-founder of the Genomics for Understanding Rare Disease: India Alliance Network (GUaRDIAN), which is one of the largest networks of clinicians and researchers in India working on rare genetic diseases. His research has contributed to a number of insights and technologies which are widely being used in India for diagnosis and screening of genetic diseases. He has been part of collaborative genomics projects aimed at understanding the Indian and Asian Genome diversity. He has also been part of the early whole genome sequencing population genomics projects including the Indian, Sri-Lankan and Malaysian genome projects and is a member of the HUGO PanAsian Population Genomics Initiative (HUGO-PAPGI) task-force. He has also established one of the earliest fellowship and education programmes in genomics for clinicians in India. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen his lab delve into the genetic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in India. His lab today hosts the major resources enabling genetic epidemiology as well as functional interpretation of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and genetic variations. He has also spearheaded the state-level genomic surveillance programmes in India. His research has also contributed to the earliest reports and significant understanding on immune escape variants in COVID-19 reinfections and vaccine breakthrough infections. He has also been a propounder of open data approaches and has been well quoted in national and international press for his work in this area. Vinod did his undergraduate medical education from Calicut Medical College, University of Calicut and PhD in Computational biology from University of Pune. Vinod has over 200 research publications in international peer-reviewed journals and two books to his credit. He is also on the editorial board of a number of journals including PLoS ONE, Translational Genomics, Journal of Orthopaedics (Elsevier) PeerJ and International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (Wiley). He is the recipient of the CSIR Young Scientist Award for Biological Sciences in 2012 , a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (2017) and the Royal Society of Public Health (2022).