Harvard-Trained Bioinformaticist
Ellen McRae Joins Parabon NanoLabs

18 September 2012

Parabon NanoLabs is pleased to announce that Ellen McRae, Ph.D., has joined the Company as its Lead Bioinformaticist. Dr. McRae received her Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University, where she received several prestigious fellowships, including the National Science Foundation Research Fellowship, and the Peirce Graduate Fellowship, awarded to the top science and engineering applicants to Harvard.

During her Ph.D., she developed methods for studying the evolution of athletic endurance in humans. She then made the jump to big data in a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she used whole genome sequencing to study the underlying genetic architecture of extreme longevity in humans.

An expert in using comparative genomics to study complex traits, Dr. McRae's addition to the Parabon team is expected to accelerate development of the Snapshot DNA Phenotyping System. She will also provide bioinformatics expertise for the Company's drug development efforts.

Dr. Steven Armentrout, CEO of Parabon NanoLabs, considers McRae's arrival a coup for the Company. "Ellen is highly talented, self-directed and perfectly suited to the projects for which she is slated. It's difficult to imagine finding a better person to lead our bioinformatics core."

McRae is equally enthusiastic about the opportunities as Parabon: "Having the opportunity to apply my love of searching for the underlying structure in genomic data to law enforcement and medicine is a dream come true!"

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For more information contact media@parabon.com, 703.689.9689 x250