Brooke Wolford

Brooke Wolford is a postdoctoral fellow at the K.G. Jebsen Centre for Genetic Epidemiology in the NTNU Department of Public Health and Nursing. She is a statistical geneticist with a PhD in Bioinformatics and Master in Statistics from the University of Michigan. Originally from North Carolina, she received her B.S. in Quantitative Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and trained at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. Wolford is interested in the development of precision medicine approaches to prevent cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). She employs computational tools and statistical models to gain insights from electronic health record-linked biobanks with paired genetic data, such as the Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT). Her research focuses on improving disease prediction as well as discovery and characterization of disease-associated genetic variants.

Position

Postdoctoral fellow at NTNU (external profile)

Selected publications

Wolford BN, Hornsby WE, Guo D, Zhou W, Lin M, Farhat L, McNamara J, Driscoll A, Wu X, Schmidt EM, Norton EL, Mathis MR, Ganesh SK, Douville NJ, Brummett CM, Kitzman J, Chen YE, Kim K, Deeb GM, Patel H, Eagle KA, Milewicz DM, J Willer C, Yang B. Clinical Implications of Identifying Pathogenic Variants in Individuals With Thoracic Aortic Dissection. Circ Genom Precis Med. 2019 Jun;12(6):e002476. doi: 10.1161/CIRCGEN.118.002476. Epub 2019 Jun 18. PMID: 31211624; PMCID: PMC6582991.

Preprint (will be out in Nature Genetics): Discovery and systematic characterization of risk variants and genes for coronary artery disease in over a million participants

Yanbo Fan, Brooke N. Wolford, Haocheng Lu, Wenying Liang, Jinjian Sun, Wei Zhou, Oren Rom, Anubha Mahajan, Ida Surakka, Sarah E. Graham, Zhipeng Liu, Hyunbae Kim, Shweta Ramdas, Lars G. Fritsche, Jonas B. Nielsen, Maiken Elvestad Gabrielsen, Kristian Hveem, Dongshan Yang, Jun Song, Minerva T. Garcia-Barrio, Jifeng Zhang, Wanqing Liu, Kezhong Zhang, Cristen J. Willer, Y. Eugene Chen, Type 2 diabetes sex-specific effects associated with E167K coding variant in TM6SF2, iScience, Volume 24, Issue 11, 2021, 103196, ISSN 2589-0042, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.103196.

Project involvement

Dr. Wolford is funded by the the EU Horizon 2020 INTERVENE Consortium. She currently co-leads analysts across 7 European biobanks to harmonize phenotypic data, evaluate polygenic scores, and estimate lifetime risk across age and sex strata.