Meet 2025 Award Recipient
Sanan Venkatesh
Sanan joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2019 after earning a Neuroscience degree with minors in Bioinformatics and Biomedical Research from UCLA in 2017. Before graduate school, he worked as a research assistant at UC Irvine under Dr. Bogi Andersen and as a postbac IRTA at NICHD under Dr. Timothy Petros.
At Mount Sinai, he studied neuropsychiatric disease genetics in the labs of Drs. Panos Roussos and Georgios Voloudakis and collaborated with the Department of Veterans Affairs to perform large-scale genetic studies. He developed machine learning models to link genotype to cell-type specific brain gene expression, aiding global research on brain disorders. During his PhD, he published 19 papers, and his thesis work is under revisions at Nature. Sanan will continue at the Center for Disease Neurogenomics as a postdoctoral fellow, advancing gene expression prediction for large-scale biobanks.