Elizabeth K. Speliotes, MD, PhD, MPH
Photo: Elizabeth K. Speliotes

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Elected 2013

Dr. Speliotes is the Keith Henley Endowed Professor of Gastroenterology and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. She is Associate Director of the MSTP program and the Institutional Representative for ASCI at the University of Michigan where she leads effort to provide support, training and support diversity efforts for the physician scientist community. She is Director of Precision Medicine for Internal Medicine where she is building biobank, analytic, and training resources to enable use of genomic and EMR data for subtyping human diseases and traits and developing specific treatments for these. She is an internationally known leader in the genetics of human obesity of an non alcoholic fatty liver disease. She is founder and leads global consortia efforts that have identified and characterized hundreds of common genetic variants that associate with obesity, NAFLD and other metabolic diseases and traits using genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis. She has helped establish cohorts to study human disease in the US and abroad.  She and her group have developed bioinformatic methods to prioritize tissues, genes and pathways highlighted from GWAS analyses. She and her group are characterizing the molecular action of NAFLD-associated variants and the genes they implicate in cellular and mouse models of obesity and NAFLD. They have created genetic marker panels to identify obesity and NAFLD subtypes and polygenic predictors of hepatic steatosis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. She serves on multiple national and international grant review and journal article review panels. Her work has earned her The Dean’s Award for best Basic Science Research, multiple talks at National and International Symposia, and is helping to change the course of metabolic disease to improve patient health.