Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
While my training was primarily in the fields of Biostatistics and Statistical Genetics, I have spent over 20 years in the study of complex genetic disease, beginning with the first family genetics study of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and continuing with multiple collaborations in Cancer, SLE and Sjogren’s Syndrome. As a pre-doctoral fellow and then an early-stage investigator I worked on the development, refinement, and application of methodology for statistical analysis of genetic data with a special emphasis on modeling methods for highly-correlated data and the implementation of these methods into software. Since then, I have directed Bioinformatics and Data Science Cores for multiple national consortia and was recently named the founding Director of the OMRF Center of Biomedical Data Sciences (CBDS). In parallel, I have been leading my own NIH-funded laboratory, focused on the immunological and genetic underpinnings of sarcoidosis since 2008. Our group led the first and only GWAS in sarcoidosis in a large multi-ancestry cohort and has since published many studies aimed at the clinical and molecular characterization of sarcoidosis patients in the US, particularly those of African ancestry or high disease burden. We have been and continue to be a part of multiple national consortia including NHLBI Life after Linkage, NHLBI Trans-omics in Precision Medicine, and NIDDK Immune Mediated Disease in African Americans.
The Genetics of Sarcoidosis as Seen Through the Prism of Sex, Ancestry, and Phenotype
Monday, October 27, 2025
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM Central Time
Disclosure(s): Merck: Consultant (Terminated, May 3, 2024)
