Deborah Nickerson, whose genomics research made her one of the most-cited American scientists of the past decade, died December 24 at age 67. Nickerson’s brother William tells The New York Times that her death was due to advanced metastatic abdominal cancer, which she had been diagnosed with less than a week before.
Throughout her career, Nickerson leveraged emerging technologies to sequence and analyze the genomes of thousands of healthy individuals of diverse ancestry. By layering these data over the annotated genome resulting from the Human Genome Project, she was able to pinpoint genes underlying conditions such as cardiovascular disease, autism, and the rare Miller syndrome.
“Her imprint on genomic medicine is profound,” Gail Jarvik, a professor of medicine and genome science at the University of Washington School of Medicine (UW Medicine), tells the Times. “Her role was in really helping us understand what changes in DNA among people meant, and ...
