Shaila Musharoff

Dr. Shaila Musharoff is a population and statistical geneticist studying human disease architecture with the goal of reducing health disparities. Shaila uses population genetic approaches to understand how demographic and cultural factors like admixture, assortative mating, migration, and sex-bias affect patterns of genetic variation. They use these insights to develop statistical methods to interrogate disease (e.g. genome-wide association studies, GWAS) and predict traits (e.g. polygenic scores, PGS) in diverse and admixed populations. Current projects in the lab include investigating the extent to which population-specific gene-by-environment interactions drive disease risk, accounting for genetic and environmental heterogeneity in population samples, and developing continuous descriptors of ancestry for disease and demographic studies.

Shaila joined the department in January 2023 as part of the Cornell CALS and the national NIH FIRST faculty cohorts. Previously, Shaila earned a Ph.D. in Genetics advised by Dr. Carlos Bustamante at Stanford University, then completed Postdoctoral training positions with Dr. Noah Zaitlen at UCSF and with Dr. Jonathan Pritchard at Stanford University.