Biography
Dr. Kiran Polavarapu is a clinician (MBBS, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) who shifted his focus to research in genomics of neuromuscular disorders (NMDs) and neurogenetics. He completed PhD in 2019 along with residency in neurology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), India, where his doctoral work focused on NGS-based diagnostics and genotype-phenotype correlations in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and other NMDs. After five years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Lochmüller Lab, Dr Polavarapu was appointed to his first independent academic position as Scientist at the CHEO Research Institute in January 2026.
Dr. Polavarapu has extensive expertise in neuromuscular genetics, deep clinical phenotyping, and advanced genomic and bioinformatic analysis. He has contributed to the analysis of more than 3,000 neuromuscular disease families, helping establish over 1,000 genetic diagnoses, and was actively involved in multidisciplinary neuromuscular clinics. Prior to joining CHEO RI, he also worked as a clinical geneticist in a high-throughput genetic diagnostics laboratory, leading genome analysis teams and gaining industry-level experience in variant analysis, interpretation and quality control.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CHEO RI, Dr. Polavarapu held a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship and played a key role in international rare disease initiatives, including the pan-European Solve-RD consortium. His independent research program integrates deep phenotyping, genomics and transcriptomics, and functional validation to improve diagnostic yield, enable novel gene discovery, and develop open-source variant interpretation workflows for inherited neuromuscular disorders, including multisystem brain-heart-muscle phenotypes