People

Alison Fohner, Principal Investigator

Dr. Fohner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at UW and Associate Director for the Institute for Public Health Genetics. She is a member of the Cardiovascular Health Research Unit at UW and adjunct investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research.

As an epidemiologist with multidisciplinary training in genomics, proteomics, bioethics, immunology, pharmaceutics, and data science, she is passionate about identifying mechanisms of individual variability in biomarkers and disease risk and translating those discoveries to improve therapies and population screening for all people, especially those from populations historically underrepresented in biomedical research.

She earned her PhD from the Institute for Public Health Genetics at the University of Washington and trained as a Clinical Informatics and Delivery Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research.

I received a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology with honors, a Minor in Chemistry, and a Master’s of Science in Biology at Stanford University, where she studied immune dysfunction in asthma.

See Google Scholar for publications.

PhD Students

Diane Xue

Diane is a PhD student in the Institute for Public Health Genetics. She has a F99/K00 award from the NIA to study how genes and environment affect Alzheimer’s disease in a multi-ethnic population. Read an interview with Diane here.

Papers from our work together include:

  1. The power of representation: Statistical analysis of diversity in US Alzheimer’s disease genetics data
  2. Conceptual frameworks for the integration of genetic and social epidemiology in complex diseases