Fasil Tekola-Ayele, Ph.D.

Dr. Tekola-Ayele leads a genetic epidemiology research lab focused on genetic and placental epigenetic mechanisms to understand links between fetal growth and cardiometabolic disease risk in ancestrally heterogeneous populations. The early life period is critical for long-term health. Fetal growth abnormalities and cardiometabolic diseases are interconnected and cause a high burden of morbidity. Understanding the complex genetic and environmental factors that underlie these relationships is crucial to developing preventive and therapeutic interventions for maximizing health across the life span. The placenta is critical for fetal development and potentially underlies later-onset diseases. Perinatal genomic studies that adequately cover the genetic variation landscape of human populations are important to advance biological understanding of diseases and reduce disparities in genomic-informed health care in the future. In the genetic epidemiology research group, we study genetic mechanisms of fetal growth variations at the maternal-placental-fetal interface and their links with cardiometabolic outcomes in ancestrally diverse human populations. Our studies so far demonstrated that genetic and epigenetic processes that regulate fetal development and placental response to maternal cardiometabolic and psychosocial factors may offer mechanistic insights to pregnancy outcomes and early origins of cardiometabolic diseases in later life.

Fasil Tekola-Ayele, Ph.D., is a Senior Investigator at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (NIH). He received his Ph.D. in genetic-epidemiology from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Universities of Brighton and Sussex, UK, and did postdoctoral fellowship in the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. Dr. Tekola-Ayele’s current research seeks to understand genetic influences and their interactions with environmental factors in growth and consequent cardiometabolic diseases in diverse ancestral populations.