Kushal Dey

Kushal Dey serves as an Assistant Professor in the Computational and Systems Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), part of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences in partnership with Weill Cornell Medicine. His research integrates statistical and machine learning approaches with genomic data to understand the regulatory architecture of complex diseases.

Dr. Dey's research focuses on developing computational methods that integrate human disease genetics with functional genomics data. His work spans immune-related diseases including Alzheimer's and inflammatory bowel disease, as well as heritable cancers like breast and prostate cancer. His lab develops models to prioritize variants, genes, and cell states for disease using genetic, genomic, and perturbation data, with emphasis on causal directed graphs and benchmarking pipelines informed by disease genetics.

His recent publications highlight expertise in GWAS, colocalization, spatial transcriptomics, Perturb-seq, and RNA+ATAC multiome analysis. His work frequently appears in top journals like Nature Genetics, with a focus on single-cell multi-omics approaches to understand disease mechanisms at cellular resolution.

Scientific Awards:

• Josie Robertson Investigator (2023–2028)
• K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award (NIH/NHGRI) (2022–2026)
• NIH/NHGRI Early Stage Investigator R01 (2025-2030)
• NCI P30 CCSG supplement – 'LLMs in cancer research' (2023-2024)
• Catalog Working Group Co-chair + Disease Focus Group Lead: IGVF consortium (2023-)

Dr. Dey mentors several graduate students through the Weill Cornell Graduate School (WGS), including Thahmina Ali, Pretty Garcia, Karthik Guruvayurappan, Louis Liu, Sarthak Tiwari, Berk Turhan, and Harry Zhang. His lab has received multiple grants including the AWS IMAGINE Grant Children's Health Innovation Award 2024-2025 (as Project Co-lead) and PSRP Developmental Funds Awards (2025: Co-lead). The lab actively collaborates with consortia including ENCODE, ADSP, MorPhiC, and IGVF, maintaining strong ties with Columbia University, Stanford University, and Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health.

The Kushal Dey Lab is part of the vibrant Tri-Institutional Research campus adjacent to Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical College, offering a collaborative environment focused on computational genomics and disease mechanisms.