Elaine Mardis

Elaine Mardis PhD is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. She is one of the most influential figures in the development and application of next-generation sequencing to cancer, having served as Co-Director of The Genome Center at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly two decades and as a core leader of TCGA. As Co-Director of The Genome Center alongside Richard Wilson, Mardis built the sequencing infrastructure and analytical pipelines that enabled TCGA's multi-cancer characterisation efforts and produced landmark papers on the genomic landscape of AML, breast cancer, lung adenocarcinoma, and numerous other malignancies. Her group performed the first whole-genome sequencing of an AML patient and matched normal tissue (published in Nature, 2008), revealing the mutational landscape of leukaemia and establishing WGS as a tool for cancer driver discovery. She contributed to foundational work on tumour neoantigen prediction from somatic mutations and on integrating immunogenomics into personalised cancer vaccine strategies. Mardis is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research.