NIH Record - National Institutes of Health

Mardis Gives Director’s Lecture, Mar. 30

Dr. Elaine Mardis
Dr. Elaine Mardis

Dr. Elaine Mardis, co-director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis), will deliver the annual NIH Director’s Lecture (second of three) on “Translating the Cancer Genome: Transforming Cancer Care” on Wednesday, Mar. 30 at 3 p.m. in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10.  

Mardis has research interests in the application of next-generation sequencing (NGS) to characterize cancer genomes and transcriptomes and using these data to support therapeutic decision-making. She co-led the teams that first used next-generation sequencing to characterize the whole genome of a patient with acute myeloid leukemia; first sequenced and compared a primary tumor to its metastasis and xenograft; and first reported whole-genome sequencing of samples from a breast cancer clinical trial. Beyond making discoveries in cancer genomics, she is leading efforts to facilitate the translation of basic-science discoveries about human genetic diseases into the clinical setting. She is devising NGS-based diagnostics, decision-support tools and databases and using genomics to design personalized cancer vaccines. 

Mardis is also the Robert E. and Louise F. Dunn distinguished professor of medicine and professor of genetics and molecular microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine.

The lecture is part of the NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture series. For information and reasonable accommodation, contact Jacqueline Roberts, (301) 594-6747.

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