Naoki Nariai, Ph.D.

Dr. Nariai joined the Frazer Lab as a project scientist in June 2015. His research interests include elucidation of genotype-phenotype relationships in diseases from population-wide genotyping and sequencing data, and development of computational methods to integrate multi-omics data for elucidation of regulatory mechanisms of biological functions.

Prior to joining the Frazer Lab, Dr. Nariai was an assistant professor at Department of Integrative Genomics, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University in Japan. His contributions include comprehensive identification of genetic variations (such as SNVs, SVs, and CNVs) in 1,070 Japanese individuals by whole-genome sequencing, and design of the custom genotyping array, named Japonica Array, whose SNP set was optimized for a Japanese ethnicity. He also developed and published numerous software and bioinformatics pipelines for sequencing data analysis, such as TIGAR, HLA-VBSeq, iSVP, HapMonster, and Sugar, which have been used in several sequencing projects.

Dr. Nariai received a Ph.D. degree in bioinformatics at Boston University, and a Master's degree in computer science at the University of Tokyo. He was trained to analyze heterogeneous genome-wide data through graphical modeling, statistical inference, and machine learning approaches.