Hyderabad · CDFD
Clinical genetics · Genomic medicine
Ashwin Dalal
Head, Diagnostics Division, CDFD
Ashwin Dalal is Head of the Diagnostics Division and a Senior Staff Scientist (Grade G) at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) in Hyderabad. He is a clinical geneticist whose work sits between patient care, molecular diagnostics, and gene discovery. He leads laboratory and clinical programmes that bring next-generation sequencing to families with rare and undiagnosed genetic disorders.
He received a gold medal in his MBBS examinations and completed an MD in Paediatrics at Goa Medical College, Goa University, then a DM in Medical Genetics at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. He joined CDFD in April 2007. His interests include clinical dysmorphology, neurogenetics, fetal medicine, lysosomal storage disorders, and mapping genes for single-gene diseases in Indian families.
He has authored or co-authored 189 papers indexed on PubMed, with an h-index of 30. He is Principal Investigator of the Mission Program on Pediatric Rare Genetic Disorders (PRaGeD), Co-Principal Investigator of the National Genomics Core, and a contributor to national genomic efforts including GenomeIndia and INDVar. He has served on task forces for DBT, ICMR, and DST, and has been Secretary of the Society for Indian Academy of Medical Genetics since 2011.
- Rare-disease diagnostics
- Novel gene discovery
- Clinical dysmorphology
- Neurogenetics
- Lysosomal storage disorders
- Prenatal screening and fetal medicine
- Long-read and structural variant analysis
- Indian population genomics
Appointments & programmes
-
National referral laboratory for cytogenetics, molecular genetics, and biochemical genetics, offering diagnosis, counselling, and prenatal testing for inherited disorders.
-
The Mission Program on Pediatric Rare Genetic Disorders, a pan-India DBT initiative to diagnose undiagnosed childhood disease, discover new genes, and build long-term genomic resources.
-
A shared sequencing facility at CDFD and NIBMG that makes high-throughput and long-read genomics accessible to researchers and students across India.
-
An Indian population-specific genomic variant database connecting clinicians and researchers to improve interpretation of disease-causing variants and variants of uncertain significance.
-
The Society for Indian Academy of Medical Genetics brings together clinicians and scientists working on genetic disease, education, and policy in India.