Athma Pai

RNA Therapeutics Institute Assitant Professor; UMass Chan Medical School
Athma A. Pai is an RNA systems geneticist who uses functional genomics and computational approaches to address open questions in mammalian gene regulation. Athma double majored in biochemistry and anthropology during her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began her research career in an anthropological genetics lab studying human migrations. Athma received her Ph.D. from the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, working with Yoav Gilad and collaborating closely with Jonathan Pritchard’s group on human and comparative genomics analyses. She then pursued postdoctoral research as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow at MIT working with Christopher Burge, focusing on understanding the changes in mRNA splicing after immune response and developing methods to measure the dynamics of such processes. Athma assumed her current position as an Assistant Professor in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the UMass Chan Medical School in January 2018. Her lab works on developing and applying methods to study the kinetics of mRNA processing and understand how various steps in RNA maturation are coordinated during the biogenesis of an RNA molecule.