Mayra Rivera

About

Mayra Rivera is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2022. Rivera's work is situated at the intersections of philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race, and gender, with a particular focus on Caribbean thought. Her research investigates the relationship between discursive and material dimensions in shaping human embodiment. Rivera's book, The Touch of Transcendence (2007), examines the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about interhuman difference. She is also co-editor of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (2010) and Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004). Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of "flesh" as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies. Currently, Rivera is writing a book exploring the relationship between colonialism, ecology, and catastrophe in Caribbean history and literature.

Research topics

• Genetics
• Biology
• Computational biology
• Pathology
• Internal medicine
• Immunology
• Medicine
• Evolutionary biology
• Virology

Selected publications

• Expanded encyclopaedias of DNA elements in the human and mouse genomes

  Nature · 2020 · 2538 citations

  data. We have developed a registry of 926,535 human and 339,815 mouse candidate cis-regulatory elements, covering 7.9 and 3.4% of their respective genomes, by integrating selected datatypes associated with gene regulation, and constructed a web-based server (SCREEN; http://screen.encodeproject.org) to provide flexible, user-defined access to this resource. Collectively, the ENCODE data and registry provide an expansive resource for the scientific community to build a better understanding of the…

  DOI

• Temporal and spatial heterogeneity of host response to SARS-CoV-2 pulmonary infection

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 263 citations

  Abstract The relationship of SARS-CoV-2 pulmonary infection and severity of disease is not fully understood. Here we show analysis of autopsy specimens from 24 patients who succumbed to SARS-CoV-2 infection using a combination of different RNA and protein analytical platforms to characterize inter-patient and intra-patient heterogeneity of pulmonary virus infection. There is a spectrum of high and low virus cases associated with duration of disease. High viral cases have high activation of inter…

  DOI

• Perspectives on ENCODE

  Nature · 2020 · 222 citations

  . The project has been extended to model organisms, particularly the mouse. In the third phase of ENCODE, nearly a million and more than 300,000 cCRE annotations have been generated for human and mouse, respectively, and these have provided a valuable resource for the scientific community.

  DOI

• DrugMap: A quantitative pan-cancer analysis of cysteine ligandability

  Cell · 2024-04-22 · 88 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• DisP-seq reveals the genome-wide functional organization of DNA-associated disordered proteins

  Nature Biotechnology · 2023-04-10 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) in DNA-associated proteins are known to influence gene regulation, but their distribution and cooperative functions in genome-wide regulatory programs remain poorly understood. Here we describe DisP-seq (disordered protein precipitation followed by DNA sequencing), an antibody-independent chemical precipitation assay that can simultaneously map endogenous DNA-associated disordered proteins genome-wide through a combination of biotinylated isoxazole precipi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K08DK080175

  NIH · $687k · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Mario L. Suvà

  Broad Institute

  199 shared

• Gaylor Boulay

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  179 shared

• Daniel A. Haber

  Harvard University

  166 shared

• B Bernstein

  Broad Institute

  161 shared

• Angela Volorio

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  126 shared

• Nicolò Riggi

  119 shared

• A. John Iafrate

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  113 shared

• Sowmya Iyer

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  99 shared

Labs

• Latinx Studies Working GroupPI

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