Biography

Anita L. DeStefano, Ph.D. is Professor of Biostatistics and and Associate Professor of Neurology, Associate Director of the BUMC Genome Science Institute, and Co-Director of the Biostatistics Program, which grants MA and Ph.D degrees in Biostatistics. She has developed a course in Statistical Genetics (BS858), which she teaches to MPH, Biostatistics Program, and other graduate students. She is also an instructor in the Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics. Her main research interest is statistical genetics. She is an investigator in the multi-national GenePD study working to identify the genes contributing Parkinson Disease. Dr. DeStefano is also involved in genetic studies in the Framingham Heart Study focusing on stroke, dementia and related endophenotypes. She is a key contributor to the analysis and development of system resources for the SNP Health Association Resource (SHARe) through which over 9,000 Framingham participants have been genotyped for 550,000 SNPs. Dr. DeStefano serves as the Chair of the Linux Cluster for Genetic Analysis (LinGA) computer cluster. This powerful compute cluster is dedicated to genetic analysis and is a shared resource used by a variety of research groups at Boston University.