Surya Nagaraja, M.D. Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

Surya is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine in the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also a member of the The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology.

Throughout his career, Surya has been fascinated by how cells integrate and respond to environmental stimuli, and how this process becomes derailed in disease. As a graduate student at Stanford University with Michelle Monje, he studied how the H3K27M oncohistone drives epigenetic dysregulation and malignant behavior in pediatric glioma. He later became interested in the earliest molecular events that precede cancer development and how persistent epigenetic alterations can link past exposures to future disease risk, as a postdoctoral fellow with Jason Buenrostro at Harvard University and the Broad Institute.

His laboratory seeks to understand how a lifetime of environmental experiences becomes written into our cells, and how decoding these molecular memories can transform the prevention and early detection of disease.

Surya spends his free time as a diehard Detroit and University of Michigan sports fan, and training for weightlifting competitions.