BWF Faculty
Michael L. Whitfield, PhD
https://geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/whitfield/
Interim Chair and Professor of Biomedical Data Science
Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology
Dr. Whitfield is the Co-Director of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Big Data in the Life Sciences Training Program. He is a Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Data Science, and Molecular & Systems Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He graduated with honors from North Carolina State University with degrees in biochemistry and chemistry. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in Biochemistry and Biophysics and then performed his post-doctoral training in genomics and bioinformatics in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he published seminal papers on the functional genomic analyses of the cell division cycle and scleroderma. Dr. Whitfield joined the Faculty at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine in 2003 in the Department of Genetics, and progressed through the ranks to full Professor with tenure in 2015. He served as the Associate Director and then Director of the Quantitative Biomedical Sciences Program from 2015 - 2018. Dr. Whitfield has served as interim chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science since November of 2017.
He is research is focused on the development of gene expression biomarkers, mining big data, systems biology and genomic networks in systemic autoimmune disease. He has focused his research on understanding the heterogeneity in and identifying novel therapeutic targets for scleroderma and applying this information to better treat patients with the disease. He was the first to identify the intrinsic, molecular, gene expression subsets in scleroderma skin, which are now being used in clinical trials. Multi-tissue networks developed by his group have demonstrated consistent, deregulated processes across end-target tissues in scleroderma, pulmonary fibrosis (PF) and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), suggesting an immune-fibrotic axis is a key driver of scleroderma pathogenesis. Dr. Whitfield was awarded Paper of the Year by the American Society for Cell Biology (Whitfield et al. 2002 MBC), he was a V Scholar for Cancer Research, was named a Hulda Irene Duggan Arthritis Investigator, and is the recipient of multiple NIH and private foundation grants.
Brock C. Christensen, PhD
http://www.christensen-lab.com
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Associate Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology
Dr. Christensen's research is focused on combining advances in molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics with the powerful techniques of modern epidemiology and statistics to characterize epigenetic states in human health and disease.
Dr. Christensen received his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin Madison in Medical Microbiology & Immunology and French, and his Ph.D. from the Program in Biological Sciences in Public Health at Harvard University. He trained as a postdoctoral research associate in molecular epidemiology of cancer at Brown University in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Dr. Christensen joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 2011.
(Photo by John Gilbert Fox)
Diane Gilbert-Diamond, ScD
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine
Dr. Gilbert-Diamond's research lab focuses on gene-environment interactions related to child growth and health including in utero exposures to toxic metals and vitamin D as well as early life exposures to electronic media and unhealthy diets.
Professor Gilbert-Diamond received her AB from Dartmouth College with a focus in Biology in 1998 and her ScD from Harvard School of Public Health with a focus in Nutritional Epidemiology in 2010. She then completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Geisel School of Medicine in Bioinformatics and was appointed to the faculty at the Geisel School of Medicine in 2012.
Giovanni Bosco, PhD
http://www.boscogeneticslab.com
Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology
Oscar M. Cohn '34 Professor of Pharmacology & Toxicology
Gio was born in the tiny fishing town of Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, Italy. Gio and his family immigrated to the US when he was 4-years old and he grew up in New York. Gio received his BA in Biology from Boston University. While at BU Gio was greatly inspired by the late evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis, where he worked in Lynn's lab for about three years. Gio also studied history and theology at the Università Pontificia Gregoriana, Rome, Italy. After Boston, Rome and three years of working as a tech he joined the biology graduate program at Brandeis University. As a grad student Gio trained with James E. Haber at Brandeis, and then he went on to be a Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation post-doctoral fellow at MIT with Terry L. Orr-Weaver. Gio was appointed to his first faculty position at the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2002, and promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2008. He moved his lab to the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in 2012. Gio was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2016, where he is currently the Oscar M. Cohn Professor in the Department of Molecular and Systems Biology. In 2015 Gio received a 5-year NIH Director's Pioneer Award for high-risk, high-reward research in "Trans-generational inheritance of social behavior." Work in the lab has also been or is currently funded by the American Federation of Aging Research, National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the US Department of Defense.
Jane Hill, PhD
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/hill-lab/
Associate Professor of Engineering
The Hill lab focuses on determining the identity of pathogens infecting the lung, bloodstream, or urine using the molecules present on a patient's breath, or directly "sniffing" the fluid, respectively. The researchers use a variety of tools in combination, including: advanced mass spectrometry, microbiology, molecular biology, advanced statistics, and also, basic electronics.
Dr. Hill grew up in rural New South Wales, Australia. Her high school years were spent in Grenfell, the birthplace of the famous Australian poet Henry Lawson. After moving to the US and finishing a BS in Chemical Engineering and technical MBA (both at Rensselaer), she ran a small bioremediation company in central New York State for a few years. However, she wanted to know more about the microorganisms that underpinned the transformations of pollutants in the soil. So, she completed her PhD at Yale University with Water Treatment Technologist Menachem Elimelech and then worked with Biotechnologist Jordan Peccia at Yale for her post-doctoral experience. She spent over a decade measuring and evaluating how organic phosphorus compounds were cycled in the environment before turning her attention to infectious diseases and metabolomics. The Hill Lab is funded by the NIH, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
