Dr. Barbara Stranger, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Denver, CO and a core member of the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research. She holds the Lyda M. Ludeman Endowed Chair in Bioinformatics in Women’s Health Research. Dr. Stranger received her PhD from The University of Montana and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and the University of Barcelona, Spain. Before joining University of Colorado, Dr. Stranger was an Associate Professor Pharmacology at Northwestern University, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Stranger is a human geneticist with a longstanding interest in understanding how genetic variation influences molecular traits such as gene expression, and how this shapes phenotypic variability in health and disease. Using a combination of computational and experimental approaches, Dr. Stranger’s research has defined fundamental principles of how human genetic variation impacts gene regulation and how these patterns vary with biological context, with special focus on the impact of sex. She also uses statistical genetics to identify genomic loci contributing to human complex trait variation. She is broadly interested in characterizing the impact of sex on the genetic architecture of complex traits and disease, and through integrating multi–omics data, identify putative causal genes and pathways to understand disease biology and nominate therapeutic targets in a ‘sex-aware’ framework. Her research program is highly collaborative, and leverages her considerable expertise in statistical genetics, genomics, and sex differences to discover how the cell translates genetic and environmental information into cellular processes and how that leads to variation in complex traits. She has been a member of the NIH Genotype-Tissue Expression Consortium (GTEx), Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Consortium, and the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF). Her lab is currently pursuing research projects to elucidate the role of sex in the genetics and genomics of cancer, as well as neuropsychiatric, cardiac, immune-mediated traits, and clinical laboratory tests.
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