Elaine Ostrander

Elaine Ann Ostrander is an American geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

She holds a number of professional academic appointments, currently serving as Distinguished and Senior Investigator and head of the NHGRI Section of Comparative Genomics; and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch.

She is known for her research on prostate cancer susceptibility in humans and for conducting genetic investigations with the Canis familiaris —the domestic dog— model, which she has used to study disease susceptibility and frequency and other aspects of natural variation across mammals.

Ostrander was born in Syracuse, New York in 1958.

Her father was a librarian and her mother was a school administrator.

The family lived in New York, New Jersey, Nebraska, and then Washington.

She has a sister and a brother, marine biologist Gary Ostrander.

She attended high school at Eisenhower High School (Yakima, Washington).

Ostrander received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington in Seattle.

In 1987, she was awarded a Ph.D. from the Oregon Health Sciences University (now known as the Oregon Health & Science University) in Portland.

She completed post-doctoral training in molecular biology at Harvard.

From 1991–1993, she was a staff scientist in the Genetics and Human Genome Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

At Berkeley, she worked in the laboratory of Jasper Rine, where the dog genome project originated.

Ostrander did her postdoctoral training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She then went to the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.

There, she began the canine genome project and, with collaborators, built the canine linkage and radiation hybrid maps.

She also wrote the white paper arguing for the genome sequencing of the domestic dog.

Ostrander also held academic appointments at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington and the University of Washington for 12 years, where she rose to the rank of Member in the Human Biology and Clinical Research Divisions and head of the Genetics Program.

She came to the NIH in 2004.

At NHGRI, she holds a number of professional academic appointments, serving as Distinguished Investigator, Senior Scientist and Head of the Section of Comparative Genetics, and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch.

She has been an NCI, DOD, DOE and NHGRI grant recipient.

Ostrander has served on the faculty of a number of leading biomedical research institutions, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington; the University of Washington in Seattle, and NHGRI in Bethesda, Maryland.

She is also affiliated as a mentor in the human genetics pre-doctoral training program at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Her professional academic responsibilities continue to include a number of leadership roles in planning, research, peer review, and tenure and promotion efforts at a number of scientific institutions, including NHGRI; The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

At the National and International level, her leadership roles include a seat on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, the American Society of Human Genetics Board of Directors and Program Committees, the American Genetic Association Council, the Faculty of 1000, and many others.

In addition, she currently oversees admissions for the NIH-Oxford Cambridge Scholars Program.

The primary goal of this project is to develop and apply the necessary resources for the identification and study of canine genes.

This will aid in an international effort to use the dog system as a model for genetics and genomics, with a special application to cancer research.

Other objectives include finding genes responsible for breed-specific diseases that can inform the genetics of similar diseases in humans.

Using this information, scientists hope to improve animal health while achieving a greater understanding of the genetic variants associated with human diseases.

The Ostrander lab has generated whole genome sequence data for dozens of dog breeds.

She has used that and related data from 175 dog breeds to understand why dog breeds behave and look differently.

Using this large and now public data set, the Ostrander lab seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying patterns of genetic information that occurs between different breeds of dogs, in both healthy and disease states.

Ostrander leads an international team of researchers, technicians, veterinarians, population geneticists, molecular biologists, statisticians, and computer scientists to accomplish her goals.

Previous trainees from the lab have gone on to become professors at major educational institutions, entrepreneurs, teachers, and science policy experts.

Thus far, Ostrander's group has been able to map genes that regulate variations seen in body size, leg length, skull shape, and fur type across breeds, with many of these findings published in high-profile journals.

Many of these genes are important regulators of growth, and help explain the 40-fold difference in body size observed between large and small breeds.

Disease-related research is done by collecting DNA in the form of blood samples from specific purebred, registered dogs.

Health histories and pedigrees are also collected as well.

In 2007, her laboratory showed that much of the variation in body size of domestic dogs is due to sequence changes in a single gene encoding a growth-promoting protein.