Towfique Raj, Ph.D. is a core faculty member in the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Genetics and Genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Dr. Raj received Ph.D. in Genetics from Cambridge University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute. Before joining the faculty at Mount Sinai, Dr Raj was an Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and was subsequently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Among his honors, Dr. Raj has received the Gates-Cambridge Scholarship from the Gates Foundation, NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, and the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease Award. His work is funded by the grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIA and NINDS), the Alzheimer’s Association, and The Michael J Fox Foundation. He is currently the Co-Chair of the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project Machine Learning Consortium. His research group uses powerful computational and experimental tools for genetic research and interdisciplinary approaches to understand the genetic factors driving neurodegenerative diseases with the ultimate goal of finding a cure. His work has highlighted the enrichment of Alzheimer’s disease risk variants in myeloid cell (including CNS microglia and monocytes) enhancers, regulatory elements in DNA that control gene expression in immune cells of the brain. More recently, Dr. Raj’s group is interested in linking genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to detectable changes in innate immune cells (monocytes and microglia) that may contribute to disease susceptibility. His group has shown that a range of neurological disease susceptibility loci are associated with gene expression or RNA splicing in microglia. His long-term interest is to translate findings from these studies to potentially identify novel immune therapeutic targets and biomarkers.