My personal research efforts are focused in the area of pharmacogenomics — determining how individual genetic differences influence response to drug treatment.

In collaboration with Dr. Richard Weinshilboum, we are using high throughput genomics technology to look at a variety of genes that are involved in drug metabolism. The goal is to understand what the range of individual genetic variation is in the structure of those genes and how that can affect the response of an individual patient to a given drug. Dr. Weinshilboum helped to develop this field, and has continued to be a leader in this area for over 20 years.

This work is part of a larger Mayo initiative in Medical Genomics — an effort to correlate changes in gene structure and function with the characteristics of disease and response to treatment. Much of my time is spent working to develop the Mayo Clinic Genomics Research Center.