Academics

Marylyn Ritchie appointed Paul Berg Professor

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Marylyn Ritchie, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and the director of the Center for Systems Genomics at Penn State, has been named the Paul Berg Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The professorship was created in 1995 by an anonymous donor in honor of Paul Berg, a 1948 Penn State graduate who was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1974 and earned the Nobel Prize in 1980 for developing a method to map the structure and function of DNA.

Ritchie's research focuses on identifying and analyzing genes that may increase susceptibility to common diseases such as cancer, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. To determine how such genes might influence disease susceptibility, Ritchie uses a variety of approaches that span the fields of biology, genetics and statistics. One of her primary approaches is to develop studies to detect interactions between genes, and to design and apply new statistical and computational methods to analyze data associated with such interactions. In addition, she explores possible interactions between genes and the environment, and studies how these interactions might increase disease susceptibility.

Ritchie is leading a collaborative effort between Penn State and Geisinger Health System to connect the genome data of 100,000 Geisinger MyCode Community Health Initiative participants with their medical histories, in order to identify the genetic and environmental basis of human disease. This new program was developed to harness the data resources being generated through a large-scale DNA-sequencing project at Geisinger in collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, where the DNA of at least 100,000 Geisinger MyCode Community Health Initiative participants will be sequenced over the next five years. In recognition of Richie's key role in this groundbreaking effort, she was named the founding director of the new Biomedical and Translational Informatics Program at Geisinger.

Ritchie has received many honors throughout her career. In 2014, she was selected as a Kavli Fellow and was invited to present in the Kavli Indonesian-American symposium. This was the fourth time Ritchie received Kavli honors. In 2012 and 2013, she was selected as a Kavli fellow and was invited as a member of the organizing committee of the Kavli Frontiers of Science Indonesian-American symposium. In 2011 she was selected as a Kavli fellow and as a general participant for the Indonesian-American symposium. In 2010, she was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, and in 2006, she received a Rising Young Investigator Award from the journal Genome Technology. In addition, she won a Best Paper Award at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in 2004. She has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Human Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Genetics, Human Molecular Genetics, Bioinformatics and PLOS Genetics. She is a member of several professional organizations including the American Society of Human Genetics and the American Statistical Association.

Before joining Penn State's Eberly College of Science, Ritchie was an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. While at Vanderbilt, she also served as an investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research, where she directed the Computational Genomics Core and the Program in Computational Genomics. In addition, she has served as a consultant for Boehringer-Ingelheim, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Ritchie received a doctoral degree in statistical genetics and a master's degree in applied statistics from Vanderbilt University in 2004 and 2002, respectively. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in 1999.

Marylyn Ritchie, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, and the director of the Center for Systems Genomics at Penn State University, has been named the Paul Berg Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

Last Updated June 18, 2015