
WILLIAM S. BUSH, PHD, MS
Associate Director for Bioinformatics Research
William S. Bush, PhD, MS, is Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Bush received his PhD at Vanderbilt University in Human Genetics in 2008 and then continued as a post-doctoral fellow in the Neurogenomics Training Program at Vanderbilt. Dr. Bush was recently named a Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation Scholar. As a human geneticist and bioinformatician, Dr. Bush’s research interests include understanding the functional impact of genetic variation, developing statistical and bioinformatics approaches for integrating functional genomics knowledge into genetic analysis, and the use of electronic medical records for translational research.
Featured Publications

Association of Arrhythmia-Related Genetic Variants With Phenotypes Documented in Electronic Medical Records.
Van Driest SL, Wells QS, Stallings S, Bush WS, Gordon A, Nickerson DA, Kim JH, Crosslin DR, Jarvik GP, Carrell DS, Ralston JD, Larson EB, Bielinski SJ, Olson JE, Ye Z, Kullo IJ, Abul-Husn NS, Scott SA, Bottinger E, Almoguera B, Connolly J, Chiavacci R, Hakonarson H, Rasmussen-Torvik LJ, Pan V, Persell SD, Smith M, […]

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 […]

Estimating cumulative pathway effects on risk for age-related macular degeneration using mixed linear models.
Hall JB, Cooke Bailey JN, Hoffman JD, Pericak-Vance MA, Scott WK, Kovach JL, Schwartz SG, Agarwal A, Brantley MA, Haines JL, Bush WS,. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of irreversible visual loss in the elderly in developed countries and typically affects more than 10% of individuals over age 80. AMD has a […]

Gene expression in cell lines from propionic acidemia patients, carrier parents, and controls.
Chapman KA, Bush WS, Zhang Z,. Propionic acidemia (PA) is an inborn of metabolism which usually presents with metabolic acidosis and accumulation of 3-hydroxypropionate among other toxins. Examining the gene expression in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from PA patients, their carrier parents and age/sex-matched controls at normal glucose and low glucose growth conditions demonstrated differences […]

Sex-Specific Parental Effects on Offspring Lipid Levels.
Predazzi IM, Sobota RS, Sanna S, Bush WS, Bartlett J, Lilley JS, Linton MF, Schlessinger D, Cucca F, Fazio S, Williams SM,. Plasma lipid levels are highly heritable traits, but known genetic loci can only explain a small portion of their heritability.In this study, we analyzed the role of parental levels of total cholesterol (TC), […]
Recent Publications
- Bai, H, Zhang, X, Bush, WS. Pharmacogenomic and Statistical Analysis. Methods Mol Biol 2023; 2629 : 305-330. PubMed PMID:36929083 .
- 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 .
- Okwuegbuna, OK, Kaur, H, Jennifer, I, Bush, WS, Bharti, A, Umlauf, A, Ellis, RJ, Franklin, DR, Heaton, RK, McCutchan, JA et al.. Anemia and Erythrocyte Indices Are Associated With Neurocognitive Performance Across Multiple Ability Domains in Adults With HIV. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 2023; 92 (5): 414-421. PubMed PMID:36580636 PubMed Central PMC10006328.
- Rajabli, F, Tosto, G, Hamilton-Nelson, KL, Kunkle, BW, Vardarajan, BN, Naj, A, Whitehead, PG, Gardner, OK, Bush, WS, Sariya, S et al.. Admixture mapping identifies novel Alzheimer's disease risk regions in African Americans. Alzheimers Dement 2022; : . PubMed PMID:36539198 .
- 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 .
- Eissman, JM, Dumitrescu, L, Mahoney, ER, Smith, AN, Mukherjee, S, Lee, ML, Scollard, P, Choi, SE, Bush, WS, Engelman, CD et al.. Sex differences in the genetic architecture of cognitive resilience to Alzheimer's disease. Brain 2022; 145 (7): 2541-2554. PubMed PMID:35552371 PubMed Central PMC9337804.
- Li, B, Jin, B, Capra, JA, Bush, WS. Integration of Protein Structure and Population-Scale DNA Sequence Data for Disease Gene Discovery and Variant Interpretation. Annu Rev Biomed Data Sci 2022; 5 : 141-161. PubMed PMID:35508071 .
- Gardner, OK, Van Booven, D, Wang, L, Gu, T, Hofmann, NK, Whitehead, PL, Nuytemans, K, Hamilton-Nelson, KL, Adams, LD, Starks, TD et al.. Genetic architecture of RNA editing regulation in Alzheimer's disease across diverse ancestral populations. Hum Mol Genet 2022; 31 (17): 2876-2886. PubMed PMID:35383839 PubMed Central PMC9433728.
- Bellenguez, C, Küçükali, F, Jansen, IE, Kleineidam, L, Moreno-Grau, S, Amin, N, Naj, AC, Campos-Martin, R, Grenier-Boley, B, Andrade, V et al.. New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Nat Genet 2022; 54 (4): 412-436. PubMed PMID:35379992 PubMed Central PMC9005347.
- Vardarajan, BN, Reyes-Dumeyer, D, Piriz, AL, Lantigua, RA, Medrano, M, Rivera, D, Jiménez-Velázquez, IZ, Martin, E, Pericak-Vance, MA, Bush, W et al.. Progranulin mutations in clinical and neuropathological Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimers Dement 2022; 18 (12): 2458-2467. PubMed PMID:35258170 PubMed Central PMC9360185.