Pharmacogenetics for Nurses: Understanding Drug Response and Patient Care

Presented by Diddahally (Raja) R. Govindaraju, PhD., Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Medicine

Diddahally (Raju) R. Govindaraju, M.S., M.F.S., Ph.D., is an evolutionary and medical geneticist with extensive expertise spanning population, quantitative, molecular, and clinical genetics, as well as genetic epidemiology, aging research and precision medicine. He has held senior academic and leadership positions at biotech companies and academic institutions including Harvard Medical School,  Boston University, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He has contributed significantly to the development of evolutionary medicine as a discipline, notably through organizing the landmark 2009 Sackler Colloquium at the National Academy of Sciences. His research integrates genomic, epigenetic, and phenotypic data to understand aging, disease, and human variation, with influential work on mutation load, genome integrity, phenomics, and genotype–phenotype (G-P) mapping. In industry, he pioneered the use of haplotypes in pharmacogenetics and contributed to early genome-wide association studies, helping translate genetic…