Worthey joins UAB's Departments of Pediatrics and Pathology as a director. Elizabeth Worthey, Ph.D., has joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Pediatrics as the director for the Center for Genomic Data Sciences. Additionally, she will serve in the Department of Pathology as the director of the Bioinformatics Section in the Division of Genomics Diagnostics and Bioinformatics. She is also the new associate director for the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute.
Her research interests include the development and application of computational science methods in order to identify and understand the impact of causal molecular variation in individuals with rare, unusual, undiagnosed or misdiagnosed disease. Her group 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.
“My goal at UAB is to help obtain definitive diagnoses for all of these patients and then to go beyond the diagnosis to extract clinically useful information that helps those taking care of these patients to make molecularly informed decisions where possible,” Worthey explained. “We look forward to working with the many wonderful clinicians and scientists already engaged in this type of work at UAB.”
Worthey notes that she and her team are also very vested in supporting the educational mission of UAB with a particular focus on attracting and keeping women and underrepresented groups in the computational sciences.
Worthey received her Ph.D. at the Imperial College London in London, U.K., and completed her postdoctoral training at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle.