Dr. Majara is a research fellow in Dr. Martin’s research group within the Analytic Translation Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with an affiliation to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. She completed her PhD in Human Genetics in 2021 at UCT. Her PhD dissertation was on the genetic basis of schizophrenia in the South African Xhosa (SAX). Currently, under the supervision of Dr. Martin, her work focuses on cataloguing novel genetic variation in African populations in order to facilitate the interpretation of genetic variation in common and rare diseases affecting Africans; and investigating the genetic architecture of psychosis in African populations in a project called Neuropsychiatric Genetics in African Populations (NeuroGAP-Psychosis), that’s within the Populations Underrepresented in Mental Association Studies (PUMAS) Network. She’s the leader of the Schizophrenia Working Group within the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Africa (PGC-Africa), and is a member of the Cross Population Special Interest Group within PGC – a consortium whose work aims to understand of the biology of psychiatric disorders in order to improve the lives of those affected.
