Arpana Agrawal, PhD

2024 Dean’s Impact Award Recipient

Arpana Agrawal, PhD, has been a key leader in the career development of several mentees, and she consistently leverages her experiences to facilitate the success of others. Agrawal’s significant track record includes securing high-impact grant funding, leadership roles, commitment to campus-wide education, dedication to providing high-quality mentorship, and the excellence demonstrated by her trainees. Agrawal’s research focuses on genetic, neuroimaging and epidemiological studies of substance use and transitions to substance use disorders, with particular emphasis on cannabis, alcohol and opioids. She has been continuously funded by NIH since becoming faculty in 2007 and is a leader across the university. She is co-chair of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s Substance Use Disorders (PGC-SUD) working group, site co-PI for the PGC grant, and scientific director of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism and leader of its genomics subcomponent. She is funded to study opioid misusers using a genome-wide association study (GWAS) framework and to conduct a GWAS of death by respiratory depression during an opioid overdose. Agrawal has served on the PhenX Substance Use working group and the ABCD genomics working group. She has also served as director of the Biomedical Research Training in Drug Abuse (BRTD) — the only WashU T32 to offer biomedical addictions training — and has advised the department on appropriate measures of addiction.