Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, AncestryDNA
Biography
Catherine Ball, Ph.D. has served as Chief Scientific Officer for AncestryDNA, LLC since September 2016. She joined Ancestry, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, in 2011 as Vice President of Genomics and Bioinformatics, helping to establish the Company’s approach to genetic genealogy leading to the launch of AncestryDNA. Cathy is a genomic scientist who has annotated and mined the genomes of various organisms and created resources to help clinicians, citizens and other scientists exploit and explore genome data. Her career has focused on helping people around the world appreciate, understand and use their own genomic data. Cathy has collaborated on the annotation of the first sequenced eukaryotic genome (brewer’s yeast) and has collaboratively built databases to explore the genomes of yeast, E. coli and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. As a pioneer in data analysis resources for high-throughput biomedical technologies, she led the Stanford Microarray Database, the largest academic database of its kind. Cathy has used high-throughput biomedical data to shed light on diverse research topics, from the biology of infectious organisms to the mechanisms involved in cell division and cancer. She has presented seminars at leading universities and contributes to National Institutes of Health committees. She received a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Cathy was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley prior to her research in the Departments of Genetics and Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Presentation Title and Company Description
Wellness and Aging Showcase: Lessons from 6 Million Human Genomes
Ancestry, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, harnesses the information found in family trees, historical records and DNA to help people make discoveries about where they come from, who they’re related to, and what makes them unique.
