The Scientist: Professor Amy Williams Maps Genes, Tracks Risk of Disease

By SHIRA POLAN

Prof. Amy Williams, computational biology, is most likely not your relative, at least within the last 10 generations. But the newly instated Cornell professor spends much of her time studying your family tree or rather, the genetic tree of all modern humans in order to better understand the complex history of human demographics.

Williams, a graduate of the University of Utah, first became interested in population genetics and parent-to-child genetic transmission during her Ph.D. work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I went to grad school expecting to do very traditional computer science but ended up taking a genetics class for my minor [and] really just fell in love with it, she said. For my Ph.D., I ended up developing an algorithm for inferring the way in which DNA gets transmitted from parents to children in single families. I then got a postdoc in a human population genetics lab and have continued to fall in love with the discipline.

Following graduate school, Williams pursued postdoctoral positions at Harvard Medical School and Columbia University before beginning research as an assistant professor in the Department of Computational Biology and Population Genetics last April.

Next fall, Williams will teach a course that will serve as an introduction to computational biology.

[The class] will likely be aimed at individuals who have a little bit of computational background. Well talk about the ways of analyzing genetic data and will begin by asking, What is the human genome? she said. This is something you can download off the Internet and read off all those letters, but how was it actually generated?

Williams said she considers her field of computational biology to be very broad, referring to the many applications computers have in the realm of biology.

Its anything from trying to predict how a protein will fold using computers, to trying to infer relationships between individuals on the basis of their genetic makeup, to comparing the genetic makeup of different species in order to learn about evolution, to methodologies for performing genome-wide association studies that attempt to identify genetic variants that affect a given trait or disease, she said.

One specific application of Williams work is the characterization of haplotypes, a series of genes that occur on a single chromosome and are likely to be inherited together.

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The Scientist: Professor Amy Williams Maps Genes, Tracks Risk of Disease