We are pleased to announce that Elizabeth “Liz” Worthey, Ph.D., will be joining the Department of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology as the director for the Center for Genomic Data Sciences in the Departments of Pediatrics and Pathology in the School of Medicine. She will join UAB at the beginning of June 2019. As part of her secondary appointment in the Department of Pathology, Dr. Worthey will serve as the director of the Bioinformatics Section in the Division of Genomics Diagnostics and Bioinformatics. She will also serve as the associate director for the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute.

She is currently a faculty investigator and director of Software Development and Informatics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. Prior to her position at HudsonAlpha, Dr. Worthey served as an assistant professor in pediatrics and the director of Genomic Informatics for the Human and Molecular Genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Dr. Worthey received her Ph.D. at the Imperial College London in London, England and completed her postdoctoral training at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Her research interests include the development and application of omic, informatic, and data science based methods and technologies in order to identify and understand causal molecular variation in rare, undiagnosed or misdiagnosed disease. Her lab also focuses on the identification and study of variation that alters an individual's response to therapeutics or modifies clinical presentation, progression, and/or outcome.

We are excited for Dr. Worthey to bring her expertise in diagnostics, genome informatics and data science to UAB and the Departments of Pediatrics and Pathology and look forward to her leadership in expanding our informatics and precision medicine goals to improve the clinical care of the children of Alabama.