Deepak Thirunavukarasu, PhD

Dr. Deepak Thirunavukarasu is a lead scientist in the genomics department. In his current role, he is responsible for driving development and validation of qPCR, next-generation sequencing and custom genomic assays at Labcorp’s central laboratory in Indianapolis. In this role, Deepak collaborates with clients and internal teams to develop and adopt assays that fulfill client requirements. He also leads efforts to validate and functionalize assays from sample processing to data delivery to ensure the assay is suitable for testing clinical samples and is compliant with regulatory guidelines.

Before joining Labcorp, Deepak was the research and development services lead at NuProbe, a startup company commercializing genomic assays using the rare-allele enrichment technology developed at his postdoctoral lab at Rice University.

Deepak received his doctorate in biology from the State University of New York at Albany. He completed his postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute (now Scripps Research) in California and then at Rice University in Texas. In both his doctoral and postdoctoral work, Deepak studied the application of nucleic acids as a sensor for the quantitative detection of protein and small molecule analytes and development of rare-allele enrichment technology for early disease detection using DNA thermodynamic modeling.