Raghav’s main research interests are in the field of molecular evolution. He is developing computational tools aimed at inferring gene function based on sequence evolution across mammals.
Over the past few years, Raghav has been involved in the development of a novel evolutionary rates-based approach that detects convergent changes in genetic elements associated with phenotypic adaptations. He applied novel methods to the the convergent evolution of four subterranean lineages and demonstrated that genetic elements exhibiting eye-specific activity showed accelerated rates of evolution in these subterranean mammals compared to above-ground mammals. Using these methods he detected a strong enrichment of convergence near annotated eye-specific elements and identified multiple uncharacterized elements showing strong convergence. More recently, Raghav has been involved in various projects aimed at improving the robustness and power of this method and packaging it as a publicly available tool for the broader research community.
During an internship at Biogen, Raghav was part of the Translational Biology department, where he worked on a project detecting context-specific expression quantitative trait loci in whole blood samples of subjects enrolled in a multiple sclerosis clinical trial cohort.