dr. Vinod Kumar Magadi Gopalaiah

About Vinod Kumar Magadi Gopalaiah

Our research interests lie in applying systems genetics strategies to infectious diseases. We perform not only integration analyses that combine the human genome, patient-specific clinical data, and multidimensional omics data but also functional studies to assess the clinical utility of our research findings. This leads to potential biomarkers, and mechanistic understandings, and eventually, patient-specific druggable pathways in infectious diseases.

After his Ph.D., Vinod continued his postdoctoral research on his RIKEN fellowship (Tokyo University, Japan), and worked on identifying genetic susceptibility variants for hepatitis B and C viral infections and their therapeutic implications. In 2011 he moved to the Netherlands as a junior PI (Wijmenga lab, UMCG) and expanded his research group to conduct systems genetic studies. To that end, he has established strong collaborations with clinicians and computational scientists to perform studies using large patient and population-based cohorts. In 2018, he obtained a Hypatia tenure track grant at Radboud UMC with the aim to identify a causal link between the genetic make-up of patients and disease heterogeneity.

Personal prizes & awards

• International Sepsis Forum and awarded the 2018 ISF sepsis award
• adjunct professor (2020-2024) at the NITTE University, Mangalore, India
• The TANDEM consortium (EU-funded 2013-2018) that investigated the factors causing the increased prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) among diabetes patients
• The ULTIMATE consortium (NIH-funded 2018-2023) to investigate the genetic basis for the link between metabolites and survival among adult and children TB meningitis patients
• ZonMw COVID19 grant (2020-2023) with the aim of identifying genetic mechanisms and biomarkers
• NIH grant (INTERCEPT 2022-2026) to extend these approaches to paediatric TB meningitis patients