Dr. Varadhan’s research focuses on the development and application of mathematical approaches for characterizing the homeostatic impairments underlying the geriatric syndrome of frailty, which increases the risk of disability and mortality. His work seeks to characterize frailty as a physiological state of vulnerability to stressors, by observing and modeling the dynamic response of multiple physiological systems to different stressors. Particular challenges in his research paradigm are: (a) the design of stress-response experiments that are population-based, and that can be implemented with minimal burden on frail, older adults, and (b) the development of mathematical modeling approaches that can handle diverse types of response data, and that can incorporate confounding factors and inter-person heterogeneity.

His other important research interests include (a) the development of computational techniques to accelerate the EM algorithm, which is a highly popular computational approach in statistics, and (b) the development and application of flexible regression modeling approaches for risk-factor etiology and for prediction in observational studies of geriatric syndromes.

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