The Blue Lab

Meet The Blue Lab

Contact Info

em27@uw.edu
(206)685-4666
University of Washington Division of Medical Genetics
1705 NE Pacific St
Box 457720
Seattle, WA 98195-7720
United States of America

Dr. Liz Blue

Liz Blue (formerly Marchani) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Genetics and faculty in both the Institute for Public Health Genetics and Statistical Genetics Program at the University of Washington (UW).

Dr. Blue is the Assistant Director of the Washington State Twin Registry and a member of the Brotman Baty Institute and the International Genetic Epidemiology Society’s Board of Directors.

Following her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Utah and postdoctoral training in statistical genetics at UW, Dr. Blue’s lab incorporates population genetics and genetic epidemiology to identify variants influencing disease within and between human populations, predicting and evaluating their functional consequences.

Her research is highly collaborative, contributing to national and international consortia including the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP), the Centers for Mendelian Genomics (CMGs) and the GREGoR Consortium, the Cystic Fibrosis Genome Project, the Genome Sequencing Project, and the Pacific Northwest Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) Clinical Site.

Students

We believe the goal of a PhD Program is two-fold: learn how to ask interesting questions and how to answer them without a user manual.

As a mentor, my primary goals are to expose the “hidden curriculum” of graduate school. I translate the expectations of their graduate program, help them structure research goals and set personal deadlines, and offer advice and resources tailored to their projects.

My students have made significant contributions to each area of research within the lab. Contact me for individual examples or references.

Current Students

Ph.D. Committees

  1. Diane Xue, Institute for Public Health Genetics, 2021-present (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)
  2. Luke Zhu, Department of Genome Sciences, 2022-present (LinkedIn)
  3. Ruoyi Cai, Department of Biostatistics, 2022-present (LinkedIn)
  4. Jingheng Chen, Institute for Public Health Genetics, 2023-present (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)
  5. Sophia Gibson, Department of Genome Sciences, 2023-present (LinkedIn)

Former Students

Ph.D Committees

  1. Daniel Seung Kim, Department of Genome Sciences, 2013-2015 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)
  2. Taryn Hall, Institute for Public Health Genetics, 2016 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)
  3. Fiona Grimson, Department of Statistics, 2016-2017 (LinkedIn)
  4. Danielle Faivre, Department of Genome Sciences, 2019-2023 (LinkedIn)
  5. Boya Guo, Department of Epidemiology, 2023 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)

Master’s Thesis Committees

  1. Hanley Kingston, Institute for Public Health Genetics, 2019-2020 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)
  2. Sam Strohbehn, Institute for Public Health Genetics, 2022-2023 *Chair (LinkedIn)

Certificate or Project Committees

  1. Nan Jiang, Ph.D. student, Department of Biology, University of Washington; Statistical Genetics Certificate, 2015-2016 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar).
  2. Eric Kernfeld, M.S. Student, Department of Statistics, University of Washington; Research Assistant, 2016. (LinkedIn, GitHub)
  3. Kathryn Franke, 1st year medical student, University of Washington; Independent Investigative Inquiry (III) Scholarship of Discovery, 2020 (LinkedIn)
  4. Diane Xue, Ph.D. student, Institute for Public Health Genetics, University of Washington; Research Assistant and T32 mentor, 2019-2022 (LinkedIn, Google Scholar)

Staff

Hiep Nguyen, Senior Computer Specialist, hiepng@uw.edu