Our Precision Health member of the month, featured in this Member Spotlight, is Stephen C.J. Parker, PhD. Dr. Parker recently received a promotion to Professor, Departments of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Human Genetics, Biostatistics.

Dr. Parker is an internationally recognized expert in diabetes genetics and multi-omics data analytics, a standing NIH study section member, has served on the Editorial Boards for top-tier journals (eLife, Diabetes), and is the Director of the P30 Integrative Data Analytics Core. Dr. Parker recently launched a new Epigenomic Metabolic Medicine Center (EM2C).

Dr. Parker was awarded with the American Diabetes Association 2024 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award in April, and is being recognized with this outstanding award at the ADA’s 84th Scientific Sessions this week in Orlando, Florida, where he will deliver an award address to over 11,000 leading physicians, scientists, and health care professionals from around the world! Read more about the award here: https://lnkd.in/gQDmP8Hm

Let’s hear more from Dr. Parker;

• Tell us a bit more about the focus and details of your current research/projects

We study the effects of genetic variation on chromatin architecture and transcriptional regulation at single-cell resolution. The major goal of the lab is to generate mechanistic knowledge about how personalized disease susceptibility is encoded in the non-coding portion of the genome (from GWAS), with a focus on complex metabolic diseases including diabetes and related traits.

• What are your research interests, more broadly:

We generate multiple high-throughput data sets on the genome, epigenome, and transcriptome across species and in disease-relevant tissues/cells at single-cell multi-omic resolution and use machine learning computational approaches to integrate and analyze this data. We aim to better understand the effects of genetic variation on chromatin architecture and transcriptional regulation at single-cell resolution.

• Please provide links to recent/significant work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06693-2

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.15.571696v1

• What do you like to do when you aren’t doing research?

I love spending time with my wife, our three kids, and our dog. One of my favorite activities is the Friday Family Fun Film night tradition we try to have every week. I love soccer, cycling, jogging, and motorsports. When time permits, I can be found driving around Waterford Hills Road Track searching for tenths of seconds improvements in my lap time.