Presenting Author
The Pennsylvania State University
Ross C. Hardison, Ph.D., is the T. Ming Chu Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Pennsylvania State University. He received a B.A. in Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Iowa in 1977. He then trained as a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Tom Maniatis at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at the Pennsylvania State University in 1980 and was promoted to Professor in 1991. His research over five decades has studied the genomics of gene regulation at many levels, from isolation of gene clusters from representative clone libraries of mammalian DNA to genome-wide determination and integrative analysis of epigenetic features and their association with regulated transcriptomes. One enduring theme of his research is the application of genomic and epigenomic analyses to the prediction of gene regulatory elements, including distal enhancers, followed by rigorous testing of those predictions experimentally. He and his collaborators have shown that strong signatures of evolutionary conservation, derived from whole-genome alignments, are good predictors of a subset of regulatory elements. Further, they have utilized systematic integration of epigenomic data to predict a broader set of regulatory elements, which were then evaluated and annotated for potential roles in different cell lineages. This research has led to a large number (over 260) of highly cited (over 67,000, h-index = 85; Google Scholar) publications and online resources to enable broad use (http://usevision.org). The research has been funded continuously, largely by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) , since 1980. Dr. Hardison currently is on the Editorial Boards of Genome Research and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and he previously held editorial positions for Genome Biology and Evolution, Genomics, Molecular Biology and Evolution, and Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. He was a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Institute of NIH (2011-2013) and the External Scientific Panel for the GTEx Genotype Tissue Expression Project (2010-2016). He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards for the GENCODE project (human and mouse gene annotation), at the Sanger Centre and European Bioinformatics Institute and for the University of California at Santa Cruz Genome Browser.