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

Characterization of the Metabochip in diverse populations from the International HapMap Project in the Epidemiologic Architecture for Genes Linked to Environment (EAGLE) project.
Crawford DC, Goodloe R, Brown-Gentry K, Wilson S, Roberson J, Gillani NB, Ritchie MD, Dilks HH, Bush WS,. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of genomic regions associated with common human disease and quantitative traits. A major research avenue for mature genotype-phenotype associations is the identification of the true risk or functional variant for […]

Enabling high-throughput genotype-phenotype associations in the Epidemiologic Architecture for Genes Linked to Environment (EAGLE) project as part of the Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) study.
Bush WS, Boston J, Pendergrass SA, Dumitrescu L, Goodloe R, Brown-Gentry K, Wilson S, McClellan B, Torstenson E, Basford MA, Spencer KL, Ritchie MD, Crawford DC,. Genetic association studies have rapidly become a major tool for identifying the genetic basis of common human diseases. The advent of cost-effective genotyping coupled with large collections of samples […]