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Program Directors

Karen Mohlke, PhD
Department of Genetics
Leader of the Karen Mohlke Lab: Genetics of Complex Traits and DiseasesResearch Expertise: Genetic basis for increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia.
Kari North, PhD
Department of Epidemiology & Carolina Center for Genome Studies
Leader of the UNC Department of Epidemiology’s CVD Genetic Epidemiology Computational Laboratory. Research Expertise: Genetic epidemiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and associated risk factors. 

Training Faculty

Christy Avery, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Genetic and gene-environment effects on cardiovascular disease.
Jeanette Bensen, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Genetics and genomics in multiethnic populations, biobanking, microRNA.
Jonathan S. Berg, MD, PhD
Department of Genetics
Research Expertise: Medical genetics, clinical cancer genetics, and personalized medicine.
Christopher Bizon 
Renaissance Computing Institute
Research Expertise: Genomic data management and annotation system.
Cynthia Bulik, PhD, FAED
Department of Nutrition
Research Expertise: Molecular studies of eating disorders and body weight regulation.
Stephen Cole, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Study designs and analyses that accurately estimate parameters of central interest to population-health scientists.
Stephanie Engel, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Genomic and environmental exposures and on preeclampsia.
Rebecca Fry, PhD
Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Research Expertise: Cancer, child development, environment (water), and global health.
Penny Gorden-Larsen, PhD
Department of Nutrition, Carolina Population Center
Research Expertise: Genomics of cardiometabolic traits over the life cycle in minority populations.
William Adam (Adam) Gower, MD, MS
Department of Pediatrics
Research Expertise: Asthma, genetics, rare/diffuse/interstitial lung, pediatric flexible bronchoscopy.
Misa Graff, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Genetic epidemiology, cardiovascular disease, gene-environment interactions, and health disparities.
Dana B. Hancock, PhD
RTI International, Senior Director, GenOmics, Bioinformatics, and Translational Research Center
Research Expertise: Human genetics, genetic epidemiology, nicotine dependence and other addictions, and lung function.
Kathleen Mullan Harris, PhD
Department of Sociology
Research Expertise: Inequality, Mobility, and Well-being; Measurements and Methods; Population, Health, and Environment; Sexuality, Reproduction, Fertility, and Families.
Taylor Hargrove, PhD
Department of Sociology
Research Expertise: Population health, racial/ethnic, gender, and skin tone stratification, aging and the life course.
Annie Green Howard, PhD
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Missing data, longitudinal and correlated data, structural equation models.
Michael Hudgens, PhD
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Collaborative research and statistical methodology development related to studies of infectious diseases.
Robert Hummer, PhD
Department of Sociology
Research Expertise: Aging in Diverse Contexts; Inequality, Mobility, and Well-being; Measurements and Methods; Population, Health, and Environment.
Yuchao Jiang, PhD
Department of Genetics and Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Statistical modeling, method development and data analysis in
Samir Kelada, PhD, MPH
Department of Genetics, Center for Genome Studies
Research Expertise: Gene-environment interactions in asthma, systems genetics, transcriptomics.
Nigel Key, MD
Department of Medicine
Research Expertise: Adult hematologist, genetic correlates of blood coagulation disorders.
Michael Knowles, MD
Department of Medicine
Research Expertise: Genetic disorders of mucociliary clearance, including gene modifiers of disease phenotype in cystic fibrosis (CF) lung and liver disease, primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), as well as idiopathic bronchiectasis.
Michael Kosorok, PhD
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Biostatistics, data science, machine learning and precision medicine.
Craig Lee, Pharm.D, PhD
Department of Pharmacy
Research Expertise: Genomics of eicosanoid metabolism, inflammation and endothelial dysfunction.
Yun Li, PhD
Department of Genetics & Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Hidden Markov models (HMM), genomics, and transcriptomics.
Danyu Lin, PhD 
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Statistical genetics, genetic epidemiology, and bioinformatics.
Jiandong Liu, PhD
Department of Pathology & Lab Medicine
Research Expertise: Mechanical forces and genetic factors underlying heart morphogenesis.
Laura Loehr, MD, PhD, MS
Department of Medicine and Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: General internal medicine and cardiovascular epidemiology.
Stephanie London, MD, Dr.PH
NIEHS Epidemiology Branch
Research Expertise: Genetics of asthma, pulmonary function, and COPD.
Michael Love, Dr. rer. nat.
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Statistical and computational methods for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing assays to facilitate biomedical and biological research.
Katie Meyer, ScD
Department of Nutrition
Research Expertise: Aging, diabetes, genomics, heart disease and stroke, nutrition and physical activity, obesity, public health studies (Design, Conduct and Analysis).
Andrew Olshan, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Gene and gene-environment interactions in multi-ethnic population.
Douglas Phanstiel, PhD
Department of Cell Biology and Physiology
Research Expertise: Rheumatoid arthritis, genome editing, bioinformatics.
Barry Popkin, PhD
Department of Nutrition, Carolina Population Center
Research Expertise: Obesity dynamics in the U.S. and low and middle-income countries, including genomic characterization.
Laura Raffield, PhD
Department of Genetics
Research Expertise: genetic epidemiology, human genetics, genome-wide association studies, precision medicine, multi-omics, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, hematological traits, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Daniela Sotres-Alvarez, DrPH
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Methods to enable nutrition and physical activity studies, with a focus on Hispanic communities.
Til Stürmer, MD, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacogenomics of CVD traits.
Patrick Sullivan, MD, FRANZCP
Department of Genetics & Psychiatry, Center for Psychiatric Genomics
Research Expertise: Genetic, genomic, and epidemiologic studies of psychiatric and eating disorders, transcriptomics.
Susan Sumner, PhD
Department of Nutrition
Research Expertise: Metabolism and metabolomics, broad applications in studies of diet, smoking, cancer, diabetes, obesity, cognitive development, liver disease, natural products, maternal and child health, and the environmental influence of disease. .
Melissa Troester, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: Molecular epidemiology, including transcriptomics and molecular phenotyping.
Daniel Westreich, PhD
Department of Epidemiology
Research Expertise: The intersection of HIV with women’s reproductive health.
Eric Whitsel, MD
Department of Epidemiology and Medicine
Research Expertise: Genetics and genomics of CVD, including gene-environment interaction.
Maimoona Zariwala, PhD
Marsico Lung Institute
Research Expertise: Genetic basis of ciliopathies, with a focus on primary ciliary. dyskinesia.
Donglin Zeng, PhD
Department of Biostatistics
Research Expertise: Likelihood-based methods relevant to genetic studies.
Fei Zou, PhD
Department of Biostatistics, Center for Genome Sciences
Research Expertise: Statistical genetics and bioinformatics for complex traits, including cystic fibrosis.