Liz Worthey

Liz Worthey, PhD, is associate professor and director of rare disease and population genomics at Michigan State University (MSU). From 2015 to 2019, she served as faculty investigator and the director for software development and informatics at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. Her work deals with clinical and translational use of genomic data.

Education

 * 1993, Undergraduate Fellow in Immunology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
 * 1994, BS with Honors in Immunology, University of Glasgow, UK
 * 1994, Postgraduate Researcher in Molecular Biology, University of Glasgow, UK
 * 1994-1995, Graduate Researcher in Immunogenetics, Oxford University, UK
 * 1996, Postgraduate Diploma in Genetics, University of Birmingham, UK
 * 2003, PhD in Genetics, Imperial College, University of London, UK
 * 2000-2005, Postdoctoral Fellow in Genomics/Bioinformatics, SBRI/University of Washington, Seattle
 * 2005, Postdoctoral Fellow in Genomics, University of Washington, Seattle
 * 2005, Postdoctoral Training Course and Summer Research Program in Molecular Evolution, MBL, Woods Hole, MA
 * 2005, Postdoctoral Fellowship, A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Wellcome Trust, HHMI headquarters, MD

Worthey's doctoral and post-doctoral researcher dealt with eukaryotic genomics and other high throughput “omics” projects.

Career
Worthey worked as a project manager for Merck & Co., then in 2008 joined the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) as senior research scientist. She became an assistant professor of pediatric genomics in 2010, then director of genomic informatics at the MCW Human and Molecular Genetics Center in 2012. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and adjunct assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and department of genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

She joined HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in 2015. In March 2019, HudsonAlpha announced she was departing to accept the position of associate professor and director of rare disease and population genomics at Michigan State University (MSU).

ME/CFS research
In 2018, Worthey received a Ramsey Award Program grant (in the amount of $45,000) to pursue a whole genome sequencing project on ME/CFS that hypothesizes the disease "is the result of an intrinsic genetic defect(s) that alters cellular metabolic homeostasis towards an unstable state." The research aims to identify the "type of variant or where in a metabolic pathway an individual’s defect lies" that, under this hypothesis, determines the course of the illness. If the hypothesis bears out, this research might also identify subtypes of ME/CFS.

Worthey will conduct this project with Camille Birch, PhD, from the Worthey Lab, in collaboration with Jarred Younger, PhD, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Younger will provide patient samples and detailed descriptions of disease presentation in those patients to guide the genetic research.