Anurag Verma, PhD

Dr. Verma is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics, and of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as Associate Director of Clinical Informatics and Genomics for the Penn Medicine BioBank (PMBB), where he leads large-scale efforts to integrate genomic, clinical, and digital health data to accelerate discoveries in precision medicine and population health. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI) and holds appointments in Penn’s Graduate Group in Genomics and Computational Biology.

Dr. Verma received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Genomics from The Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research program combines population genomics, biomedical informatics, and machine learning/AI to advance understanding of disease etiology and genetic risk across diverse populations. His recent work has focused on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), multi-ancestry fine-mapping, pleiotropy analysis, and deep phenotyping using electronic health record (EHR) data from biobanks such as the VA Million Veteran Program and PMBB.

Dr. Verma has led or contributed to studies characterizing the genetic architecture of complex traits across ancestries, developing novel statistical and computational methods to improve trait mapping, and deploying large language models (LLMs) for clinical prediction tasks such as rare disease detection. He actively collaborates with national research networks and federal partners (e.g., Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Energy) to scale biobank-based precision health initiatives. His long-term goal is to enable equitable genomic discovery and risk prediction that informs early diagnosis, clinical decision-making, and health interventions at the population level.