DANA C. CRAWFORD, PHD
Associate Director for Population and Diversity Research
Dana Crawford, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and Associate Director for Population and Diversity Research in the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology. She also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences. Dr. Crawford received her Ph.D. at Emory University in genetics and molecular biology in 2000 and then trained as a post-doctoral fellow as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000–2002) and as a senior fellow at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences (2002–2006). Prior to her most current position, Dr. Crawford spent eight years as tenure-track faculty in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics and Investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt University. As a genetic epidemiologist at CWRU, Dr. Crawford’s broad research interests include applying genetic variation data to large-scale epidemiologic and clinical cohorts to better understand human genotype-phenotype associations with an emphasis on diverse populations.
Recent Publications
- Chen, F, Madduri, RK, Rodriguez, AA, Darst, BF, Chou, A, Sheng, X, Wang, A, Shen, J, Saunders, EJ, Rhie, SK et al.. Evidence of Novel Susceptibility Variants for Prostate Cancer and a Multiancestry Polygenic Risk Score Associated with Aggressive Disease in Men of African Ancestry. Eur Urol 2023; : . PubMed PMID:36872133 .
- Waksmunski, AR, Kinzy, TG, Cruz, LA, Nealon, CL, Halladay, CW, Anthony, SA, Greenberg, PB, Sullivan, JM, Wu, WC, Iyengar, SK et al.. Diversity is key for cross-ancestry transferability of glaucoma genetic risk scores in Hispanic Veterans in the Million Veteran Program. Pac Symp Biocomput 2023; 28 : 413-424. PubMed PMID:36540996 PubMed Central PMC9997528.
- Liu, J, Nair, V, Zhao, YY, Chang, DY, Limonte, C, Bansal, N, Fermin, D, Eichinger, F, Tanner, EC, Bellovich, KA et al.. Multi-Scalar Data Integration Links Glomerular Angiopoietin-Tie Signaling Pathway Activation With Progression of Diabetic Kidney Disease. Diabetes 2022; 71 (12): 2664-2676. PubMed PMID:36331122 PubMed Central PMC9750948.
- Yang, HT, Crawford, DC, Abazeed, ME. Editorial: Translating clinical genomics and health informatics into precision oncology. Front Genet 2022; 13 : 1029212. PubMed PMID:36263433 PubMed Central PMC9574329.
- Lutnick, B, Manthey, D, Becker, JU, Ginley, B, Moos, K, Zuckerman, JE, Rodrigues, L, Gallan, AJ, Barisoni, L, Alpers, CE et al.. A user-friendly tool for cloud-based whole slide image segmentation with examples from renal histopathology. Commun Med (Lond) 2022; 2 : 105. PubMed PMID:35996627 PubMed Central PMC9391340.
- Liu, S, Bush, WS, Miskimen, K, Gonzalez-Vicente, A, Bailey, JNC, Konidari, I, McCauley, JL, Sedor, JR, O'Toole, JF, Crawford, DC et al.. T-cell receptor diversity in minimal change disease in the NEPTUNE study. Pediatr Nephrol 2023; 38 (4): 1115-1126. PubMed PMID:35943576 .
- Waksmunski, AR, Kinzy, TG, Cruz, LA, Nealon, CL, Halladay, CW, Simpson, P, Canania, RL, Anthony, SA, Roncone, DP, Sawicki Rogers, L et al.. Glaucoma Genetic Risk Scores in the Million Veteran Program. Ophthalmology 2022; 129 (11): 1263-1274. PubMed PMID:35718050 PubMed Central PMC9997524.
- Verma, A, Tsao, NL, Thomann, LO, Ho, YL, Iyengar, SK, Luoh, SW, Carr, R, Crawford, DC, Efird, JT, Huffman, JE et al.. A Phenome-Wide Association Study of genes associated with COVID-19 severity reveals shared genetics with complex diseases in the Million Veteran Program. PLoS Genet 2022; 18 (4): e1010113. PubMed PMID:35482673 PubMed Central PMC9049369.
- Menon, R, Bomback, AS, Lake, BB, Stutzke, C, Grewenow, SM, Menez, S, D'Agati, VD, Jain, S, Kidney Precision Medicine Project. Integrated single-cell sequencing and histopathological analyses reveal diverse injury and repair responses in a participant with acute kidney injury: a clinical-molecular-pathologic correlation. Kidney Int 2022; 101 (6): 1116-1125. PubMed PMID:35339536 PubMed Central PMC9769136.
- Peloso, GM, Tcheandjieu, C, McGeary, JE, Posner, DC, Ho, YL, Zhou, JJ, Hilliard, AT, Joseph, J, O'Donnell, CJ, Efird, JT et al.. Genetic Loci Associated With COVID-19 Positivity and Hospitalization in White, Black, and Hispanic Veterans of the VA Million Veteran Program. Front Genet 2021; 12 : 777076. PubMed PMID:35222515 PubMed Central PMC8864634.
Featured Publications

Trans-ethnic fine-mapping of genetic loci for body mass index in the diverse ancestral populations of the Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study reveals evidence for multiple signals at established loci.
Fernández-Rhodes L, Gong J, Haessler J, Franceschini N, Graff M, Nishimura KK, Wang Y, Highland HM, Yoneyama S, Bush WS, Goodloe R, Ritchie MD, Crawford D, Gross M, Fornage M, Buzkova P, Tao R, Isasi C, Avilés-Santa L, Daviglus M, Mackey RH, Houston D, Gu CC, Ehret G, Nguyen KH, Lewis CE, Leppert M, Irvin […]

eMERGE Phenome-Wide Association Study (PheWAS) identifies clinical associations and pleiotropy for stop-gain variants.
Verma A, Verma SS, Pendergrass SA, Crawford DC, Crosslin DR, Kuivaniemi H, Bush WS, Bradford Y, Kullo I, Bielinski SJ, Li R, Denny JC, Peissig P, Hebbring S, De Andrade M, Ritchie MD, Tromp G,. We explored premature stop-gain variants to test the hypothesis that variants, which are likely to have a consequence on protein […]

Genetic variation among 82 pharmacogenes: The PGRNseq data from the eMERGE network.
Bush WS, Crosslin DR, Owusu-Obeng A, Wallace J, Almoguera B, Basford MA, Bielinski SJ, Carrell DS, Connolly JJ, Crawford D, Doheny KF, Gallego CJ, Gordon AS, Keating B, Kirby J, Kitchner T, Manzi S, Mejia AR, Pan V, Perry CL, Peterson JF, Prows CA, Ralston J, Scott SA, Scrol A, Smith M, Stallings SC, Veldhuizen […]

Towards a phenome-wide catalog of human clinical traits impacted by genetic ancestry.
Dumitrescu L, Restrepo NA, Goodloe R, Boston J, Farber-Eger E, Pendergrass SA, Bush WS, Crawford DC,. Racial/ethnic differences for commonly measured clinical variables are well documented, and it has been postulated that population-specific genetic factors may play a role. The genetic heterogeneity of admixed populations, such as African Americans, provides a unique opportunity to identify […]