Gloria Petersen, Ph.D. holds appointments in the departments of Health Science Research, Gastroenterology, and Medical Genetics. She is Professor of Epidemiology, College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, and holds the Purvis and Roberta Tabor Professorship. She is also certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics as a Ph.D. Medical Geneticist and is a lifetime member of the American College of Medical Genetics.

Dr. Petersen's research interests and expertise are in the application of genetic epidemiology to cancer etiology, including genetic linkage analysis of cancer families for gene discovery, and genetic association studies for characterizing gene-environment interaction. Her disease research focus is pancreatic and other gastrointestinal cancers. Her goal is to translate gene discoveries into clinical application, with respect to improving risk assessment through modeling and studying impact of genetic testing.

Dr. Petersen's funded research programs are primarily an R01 for the Pancreatic Cancer Genetic Epidemiology (PACGENE) Consortium, in which she directs an eight-center consortium that is prospectively recruiting high risk familial pancreatic cancer kindreds and genotyping them to localize the chromosomal regions that harbor susceptibility loci, and identification of the gene(s) themselves. We have developed a resource of over 2,000 families for study.

She also directs the Mayo Clinic SPORE in Pancreatic Cancer and has a project to study the molecular epidemiology of pancreatic cancer using genome wide and candidate gene association studies. Hundreds of cases and controls have been genotyped for SNPs to identify genetic risk and gene-environment interactions. As a result of her work, she is on the leadership teams of the NCI-based PanScan studies, and the Pancreatic Cancer Case-Control Consortium (PANC4). Click on link to "gi genetic epidemiology" for more information.