genomeboy.com

Misha Angrist, an assistant professor at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University, completed his graduate studies with Chakravarti working on the genetic basis of Hirschsprung’s disease. Angrist remembers his mentor as an idea man above all else. “In the 1990s, I used to walk into Aravinda’s office and he’d be sitting there chain smoking and he’d have a yellow pad of paper in front of him and a pencil and he would sit there and…using only his own gray matter, solve a problem [in] population genetics, with no computer and no massive datasets,” Angrist says. “So he comes from this very pure intellectual tradition in genetics.”

I was extremely fortunate to have seven years in the Chakravarti lab, even if I didn’t always appreciate the experience at the time. Read the rest of the tribute to Aravinda here.