Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Cardiovascular Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Meraj is a physician-scientist with a background in cardiovascular medicine and genetics research. During his medical studies at Hannover Medical School, Germany, he was a student research scholar under the guidance of Dr. Christine Seidman and Dr. Jonathan Seidman at Harvard Medical School, as a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. There, he was involved in studying gene regulation in genetic cardiomyopathies, congenital heart disease, and method development for studying disease models. He performed clinical training in cardiology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany, where he developed deep learning models for effective cardiovascular risk assessment. After returning to the Seidman Laboratories as a postdoctoral research fellow supported by the Walter-Benjamin-Program of the German Research Foundation, he uses single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics technologies to enhance our understanding of genetic and acquired cardiomyopathies. He is also working on optimizing gene editing strategies to mitigate off-target editing and unwanted immune reactions.