Headshot portrait of Maya Varma - Bio-X Undergraduate Fellow
2019 and 2018 Undergraduate Summer Research Program Participant

Home Department: Computer Science
Mentor: Dennis Wall, Pediatrics (System Medicine) and Biomedical Data Science

2018 Research Project: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a group of neurological disorders characterized by social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. Maya’s research focuses on identifying genetic links with the autism phenotype, potentially paving the way for novel genetics-based diagnostic methods.

Photo of USRP student Maya Varma in the laboratory, showing graphs on two computer screens.2019 Research Project: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. ASD is a genetically complex disorder, but the contribution of noncoding DNA regions to ASD susceptibility remains unclear. Maya is developing a machine learning approach for identifying variants in the noncoding genome that are potentially linked with the ASD phenotype, with the goal of better understanding the genetic development of ASD.