SPEAKER BIO
Dr. Joanne Cole is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School conducting research with Drs. Joel Hirschhorn and Jose Florez at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Currently supported by an NIDDK K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, her research focuses on using statistical genetics as a tool to determine diet’s relationship with human health, with an emphasis on cardiometabolic diseases. Dr. Cole received her PhD in Human Genetics and Genomics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Spritz studying the genetic determinants of normal human facial shape and body size in children and adolescents from Tanzania. In 2016, she went to Boston to pursue her postdoctoral training with Drs. Florez and Hirschhorn to apply her skillset in quantitative genetics to disease biology as a lead analyst in the ‘Genetics of Nephropathy – an International Effort’ (GENIE) consortium whose goal is to identify and characterize the genetics of diabetic kidney disease. Combining her interests from her graduate and postdoctoral training in complex human phenotypes and metabolic disease, she ventured into studying the biological basis of dietary intake as an American Diabetes Association postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Cole continues to pursue the genetics of dietary intake with three interconnected goals, 1) improve dietary phenotypes using genetics, 2) decipher the mechanisms mediating genetic influences on dietary intake, and 3) use genetics to elucidate the underlying causal relationships between nutrition and human health.