People

W. Richard McCombie

Professor
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1982

One of the most exciting areas of research to arise from genomics is the role of sequence variation among individuals of the same species in determining their phenotype in areas as disparate as behavior and susceptibility to diseases.The completion of the human genome reference and new techniques and instruments that have just become available have changed the way that we do human genetics. The availability of instruments that allow a small number of people to generate 100s of billions of bases of sequence data a day now makes possible human genetics at the nucleotide level of resolution.Our particular focus in on the role of genomic variation in causing two major disease classes, cognitive disorders(such as schizophrenia) and bipolar disorder and cancer.