Dr. Siddharth Prakash

Siddharth Prakash has a Ph.D. in Molecular and Human Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also completed his residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Cardiovascular Disease. Since 2011, Dr. Prakash has worked in the John Ritter Research Program in Aortic and Vascular Diseases at McGovern Medical School, a part of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), where he specializes in medical therapy, imaging and surveillance of patients with heritable aortic and vascular diseases. He is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and is co-director of the Turner Syndrome Adult Comprehensive Care Center. Dr. Prakash’s translational research l focuses on the contribution of rare genomic copy number variants (CNVs) to bicuspid aortic valve (BAV), the most common adult congenital heart defect. Dr. Prakash uses an innovative strategy to identify new candidate genes for BAV, based in part on the hypothesis that reduced dosage of genes on the X chromosome is responsible for the increased prevalence of BAV in males and in women with Turner syndrome. He identified recurrent CNVs in diverse clinical cohorts with BAV and demonstrated that specific rare CNVs are an important contributing cause of thoracic aortic aneurysms. Dr. Prakash received funding from the American Heart Association and National Institutes of Health follow up on these observations in patients with early complications of bicuspid aortic valve disease.