Dr Gayathry Krishnamurthy

Dr Gayathry Krishnamurthy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Genetic Epidemiology at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania. Her research focuses on understanding the genetic and molecular factors that may contribute to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, including preeclampsia, and to cardiovascular disease risk later in life.

Gayathry holds a Bachelor of Technology in Biotechnology Engineering from SRM Institute of Science and Technology, India, and a Master of Science in Molecular Medicine from Curtin University, Western Australia. She earned her Graduate Certificate in Research and PhD in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Tasmania. Her doctoral research, completed in 2025, examined shared genetic susceptibility between pregnancy hypertension and subsequent cardiovascular disease.

Her ongoing work combines genetic information, clinical characteristics and linked health records to better understand long-term cardiovascular outcomes after pregnancy hypertension. This includes using genome-wide association studies to identify genetic variants that may contribute to both pregnancy hypertension and later cardiovascular disease, and evaluating polygenic risk scores, which combine information from many genetic variants into a single measure of inherited susceptibility, to examine how genetic predisposition may influence future cardiovascular risk following hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.

Her broader research also includes lipidomics, the study of a wide range of lipid molecules, as well as multi-omics and machine learning approaches. Through this work, she is exploring how genetic, molecular and clinical information can be brought together to better understand and predict cardiovascular disease risk following hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.

In Tasmania, Gayathry is developing collaborations with clinicians and consumer representatives to support research addressing women’s health beyond pregnancy and the immediate postnatal period. She values the involvement of women with lived experience in shaping research priorities and is committed to making scientific findings accessible. Alongside her research, she contributes to student supervision, researcher training, mentoring and community science engagement.

As AAPEC’s Research Liaison Officer, Gayathry draws on her own experience as a researcher to support AAPEC’s research activities, strengthen connections between researchers, clinicians and consumers, and encourage meaningful involvement of women and families with lived experience in research.