Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, Ph.D.

Kerstin Lindblad-Toh is a professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University, the director of Science for Life Laboratory Uppsala, and the scientific director of vertebrate genome biology at the Broad Institute.

At the Broad Institute, Lindblad-Toh is responsible for the 29 Mammals Project to annotate the human genome for functional constraint, as well as a large number of vertebrate genome projects, several of which emphasize the detection of selective sweeps. She also leads the dog disease-mapping group. Her group has developed several SNP chips that have been used to identify canine disease genes.

In Uppsala, Lindblad-Toh’s research emphasizes the dog as a comparative model for human diseases. Her group is mapping over 20 diseases including cancer and autoimmune, cardiac, and neurological diseases. Many of the findings are now being translated to human patients cohorts. She has been an active participant in the LUPA consortium, an FP7 project aiming to map human complex traits using dog as a model.

Lindblad-Toh is also the director of Science for Life Laboratory Uppsala, a novel strategic research center with the vision of being an internationally leading center that develops, applies, and provides access to large-scale technologies for molecular biosciences, with a focus on translational medicine and on evolutionary and systems biology.

An author on over 120 papers, Lindblad-Toh has received several scholarships and awards from the Svenska Institutet Scholarship for Research Abroad and the Swedish Medical Research Council, in addition to the prestigious European Young Investigator award (EURYI) and ERC Consolidator Awards, the Fernström Prize, and the Lilly and Sven Thureus prize. In 2012, she was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Lindblad-Toh received her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, in 1998 studying trinucleotide repeat disorders. While a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, Lindblad-Toh worked on several projects, including mouse SNP discovery, the development of genotyping technologies, and association studies in human disease.

January 2013