Interview A discussion on genome-wide associations in pharmacogenomics

Alison Motsinger-Reif began her research career in physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University (NC, USA) studying the turnover rates of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, aspartate, glutamate and GABA in brain regions of rats self-administering cocaine. After matriculating to Vanderbilt University (TN, USA), she focused on classical immunology/virology in HIV/AIDS, and then joined the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt University to study computational genetics. While there, she received a MS in Applied Statistics along with a PhD in Human Genetics. Since 2007, she has been at North Carolina State University (NC, USA) in the Department of Statistics, and an active Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC, USA). She is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Bioinformatics Consulting and Service Core of North Carolina State University. Her research is focused on development of computational methods to detect genetic variants that predict complex phenotypes, such as drug response. In particular, she is focused on methods to detect gene-gene and gene-environment interactions in large-scale genomic data.