Dr. Gloria Petersen holds appointments in the departments of Health Science Research, Gastroenterology, and Medical Genetics. She is Professor of Epidemiology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. She is also certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics as a PhD Medical Geneticist.

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 research focus is particularly on applying genetic epidemiologic methods to colorectal and pancreatic cancers. She is also interested in translating 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 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 1300 families for study. Dr. Petersen also directs the SPORE in Pancreatic Cancer and has a project to study the molecular epidemiology of pancreatic cancer. We will be genotyping 1200 cases and 1200 controls for candidate SNPs to study genetic risk and gene-environment interactions.