Co-Investigator, Health and Retirement Study
Contact Information
515 Delaware Street SE, Room 1-136 Moos Tower
MMC 609
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Phone: 612-624-1257
E-mail: [email protected]
Education
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2004
M.P.H., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2000
M.B.B.S., Grant Medical College, 1998
Research and Projects
Dr. Thyagarajan is director of the Division of Molecular Pathology and Genomics, and a faculty investigator in the Advanced Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ARDL). The MDL processes some 25,000 specimens annually related to inherited and infectious diseases, bone marrow engraftment, and blood and solid tumor malignancies. Thyagarajan and his MDL colleagues are implementing next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) for diagnosing genetic disease.
Selected Recent Publications
. Associations of Age, Sex, Race/Ethnicity and Education with 13 Epigenetic Clocks in a Nationally Representative US Sample: The Health and Retirement Study. The Journals of Gerontology: Series A . 2021;76(6):1117-1123. doi:10.1093/gerona/glab016
. Development of a novel transcriptomic measure of aging: Transcriptomic Mortality-risk Age (TraMA). medRxiv. Forthcoming. doi:10.1101/2024.12.04.24318517
Association of Blood-based Neurodegenerative Biomarkers with cognitive functioning and dementia in India (LASI-DAD) and the United States (HRS). Am J Epidemiol. Forthcoming. doi:10.1093/aje/kwaf179
. How much can biomarkers explain sociodemographic inequalities in cognitive dysfunction and cognitive impairment? Results from a machine learning model in the Health and Retirement Study. J Alzheimers Dis. 2025;106(1):54-68. doi:10.1177/13872877251338063
Aging measures and cancer in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Nat Commun. 2025;16(1):5916. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-60913-z