Dr. Rajini Haraksingh is a human geneticist with a passion for studying life at its most fundamental molecular levels. She believes that the people of the Caribbean should not only be consumers of global scientific & technological advances, but rather important contributors, leveraging our unique features to directly impact both the region and the world. Leading by example, after training at top institutions abroad, she returned to Trinidad in 2015 to join the UWI as a Lecturer in Biotechnology.
She leads a research group in human genomics and precision medicine and teaches in the UWI’s Biotechnology programmes. Her research focuses on developing and implementing cutting-edge technologies for studying the human genome, and for discovering novel genetic contributors to various human diseases. In particular, her group is focused on applying these technologies for improving diagnostics and therapeutics in Caribbean populations.
Her approach in the classroom challenges students to apply what they know in ingenious ways to solve seemingly intractable problems, in which there is often no single best solution. Dr. Haraksingh was born and raised in Trinidad, where she attended St. Augustine Girls’ High School and represented T&T at the International Mathematics Olympiad. She received two Bachelors’s degrees from MIT in Mathematics and Biology, a PhD in Human Genetics from Yale, and postdoctoral training at Stanford in Genomics and Personalized Medicine. She is also a classically trained dancer, certified yoga instructor, wife, and daughter. She has recently embarked on her most important genetics experiment to date; being a new mom!