Kelly A Frazer is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Medical School at the University of California, San Diego, Chief of the Division of Genome Information Sciences and Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine.

Education

Frazer did her undergraduate studies at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

. She then attended the

UCSF Medical Center The UCSF Medical Center is a research and teaching hospital in San Francisco, California, and is a medical center of the University of California, San Francisco. It is affiliated with the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Helen Diller Famil ...

at the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedic ...

and received her PhD in 1993.

Research

Over the past thirty-three years Frazer has researched and discovered insights into the molecular underpinnings of a wide variety of human diseases and

complex traits Complex traits are phenotypes that are controlled by two or more genes and do not follow Mendel's Law of Dominance. They may have a range of expression which is typically continuous. Both environmental and genetic factors often impact the variat ...

. As a postdoctoral fellow she and Edward Rubin pioneered cross-species DNA sequence comparisons between humans and mice resulting in the discovery of evolutionarily conserved

non-coding Non-coding DNA (ncDNA) sequences are components of an organism's DNA that do not encode protein sequences. Some non-coding DNA is transcribed into functional non-coding RNA molecules (e.g. transfer RNA, microRNA, piRNA, ribosomal RNA, and regula ...

regulatory sequence A regulatory sequence is a segment of a nucleic acid molecule which is capable of increasing or decreasing the expression of specific genes within an organism. Regulation of gene expression is an essential feature of all living organisms and vir ...

s in the human genome. As Vice President of Genome Biology at Perlegen Sciences Frazer worked with David Cox and others to generate the content for the

HapMap The International HapMap Project was an organization that aimed to develop a haplotype map (HapMap) of the human genome, to describe the common patterns of human genetic variation. HapMap is used to find genetic variants affecting health, diseas ...

Phase II project and determined that common structural variants are largely in

linkage disequilibrium Linkage disequilibrium, often abbreviated to LD, is a term in population genetics referring to the association of genes, usually linked genes, in a population. It has become an important tool in medical genetics and other fields In defining LD, it ...

with common

SNPs In genetics and bioinformatics, a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP ; plural SNPs ) is a germline substitution of a single nucleotide at a specific position in the genome. Although certain definitions require the substitution to be present in ...

. She joined UC San Diego as a faculty member in August 2009 and has developed novel methods for identifying and functionally characterizing regulatory variants underlying

GWAS GWAS may refer to: *Genome-wide association study, study of mutations' correlations with disease or other phenotypic expressions *''gwas'', a Welsh term for a valet * Great Western Ambulance Service, the ambulance service serving Somerset, Gloucest ...

signals and has contributed to a greater understanding of mutational signatures in cancer.

References

External links

Faculty web page

Frazer Lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Frazer, Kelly A. University of California, San Diego faculty American pediatricians American women pediatricians American geneticists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women biologists 21st-century American women physicians 21st-century American physicians Physicians from California University of California, Santa Cruz alumni University of California, San Francisco alumni