Dr. Seyedeh (Maryam) Zekavat received her BSc in Biological Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Supported by an MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives Grant, she studied at Roche in Switzerland where she developed a computational model of retinal cholesterol dynamics to model drusen development in dry age-related macular degeneration. After graduation, she worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a Computational Biologist in the Medical and Population Genetics Program. At the Broad, she used human genetics to study inherited genetic causes of blood lipid variation and myocardial infarction using diverse computational and bioinformatics tools for processing genomic, biomarker, and phenotype data, and published one of the first deep whole genome sequencing studies.

As an MD/PhD student at Yale, Dr. Zekavat performed research collaboratively between the Center for Statistical Genomics and Proteomics at Yale and the Broad Institute. Her PhD project was on the study of phenotypic consequences of acquired hematopoietic somatic variants, which identified significant associations with malignancies and infections, including severe COVID-19. She has received multiple grants and awards including an NIH-NHLBI F30 Grant Award, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, and the Precision Medicine and Genomics Early Career Investigator Award from the American Heart Association. 

At Mass Eye and Ear, Dr. Zekavat is applying her prior experiences with big-data analytics in genomics, phenomics, and imaging towards Ophthalmology. Combining retinal imaging, systemic phenotypes, and genotypes using deep learning and other analytical methods among thousands of individuals, she has linked retinal imaging features with genomics and with future risk of systemic and ocular phenotypes. She has over 70 publications in journals such as Nature,  Circulation, and Ophthalmology.