Margaret Pericak-Vance, Ph.D.

Dr. Pericak-Vance is the Director of the Miami Institute for Human Genomics. She is a founding fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and a board-certified PhD medical geneticist. Dr. Pericak-Vance is a global leader in the genetics of common diseases.

She excels at the integration of genomic and statistical technologies and their application to diseases of public health importance in general, and to neurologic diseases in particular. Her more than 400 peer-reviewed papers demonstrate outstanding productivity and establish important milestones in diseases that include tuberous sclerosis, the muscular dystrophies, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), autism, and Alzheimer disease (AD).

She pioneered the use of novel disease gene mapping, leading to the identification of apolipoprotein E (APOE) as the major susceptibility gene for AD. Her recent accomplishments include the 2007 identification of the IL7R risk gene for multiple sclerosos, the 2005 discovery of the CFH gene that determines an individual's risk for developing age-related macular degeneration, and the identification of a gene contributing to the expression of age-at-onset in AD and PD in 2003.

Her greatest contribution has been her leadership in the application of methodological innovations capitalizing on the Human Genome Project that affect not only the neurological sciences but all of medicine. Dr. Pericak-Vance is internationally recognized by her peers as a leader in human genetics research. In 1997, Newsweek magazine named Dr. Pericak-Vance to the "Century Club: 100 People to Watch as We Move to the Next Millennium." In 2001, Dr. Pericak-Vance and Dr. Jeffery M. Vance received the McKnight Memory and Brain Disorders Award for "Studies of Mitochondrial Haplogroups in Alzheimer Disease Families." Also in 2001, Dr. Pericak-Vance received the international "Louis D" Scientific Prize from the Institut de France's Academie des Sciences for her AD research. She was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2004. Dr. Pericak-Vance holds numerous research grants through the National Institutes of Health that support her research into the genetics of complex disease.