ASHG Curt Stern Award - ASHG 2015
Leonid Kruglyak, PhD
ASHG TV talks to Leonid Kruglyak, PhD, of UCLA and recipient of the prestigious Curt Stern Award. This annual award, named for the late pioneering geneticist Curt Stern, PhD, recognizes genetics and genomics researchers who have made significant scientific contributions during the past decade. Throughout his career, Dr. Kruglyak has focused on understanding how a person’s genes interact with each other and the environment to influence his or her traits, such as appearance, behavior, and disease susceptibility. Over the next decade, he authored key papers predicting the number of genetic markers required for genome-wide association studies in humans, and pioneered the field of genetics of global gene expression (now known as eQTL analysis). In recent years, Dr. Kruglyak’s laboratory has focused on using genomic technology to establish the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as powerful model organisms for the study of complex genetic variation. ASHG TV asks Professor Kruglyak about the latest developments in his research.