
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

Bioinformatics challenges in genome-wide association studies (GWAS).
De R, Bush WS, Moore JH,. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are a powerful tool for investigators to examine the human genome to detect genetic risk factors, reveal the genetic architecture of diseases and open up new opportunities for treatment and prevention. However, despite its successes, GWAS have not been able to identify genetic loci that […]

Automated extraction of clinical traits of multiple sclerosis in electronic medical records.
Davis MF, Sriram S, Bush WS, Denny JC, Haines JL,. The clinical course of multiple sclerosis (MS) is highly variable, and research data collection is costly and time consuming. We evaluated natural language processing techniques applied to electronic medical records (EMR) to identify MS patients and the key clinical traits of their disease course.We used […]

Associations between KCNJ6 (GIRK2) gene polymorphisms and pain-related phenotypes.
Bruehl S, Denton JS, Lonergan D, Koran ME, Chont M, Sobey C, Fernando S, Bush WS, Mishra P, Thornton-Wells TA,. G-protein coupled inwardly rectifying potassium (GIRK) channels are effectors determining degree of analgesia experienced upon opioid receptor activation by endogenous and exogenous opioids. The impact of GIRK-related genetic variation on human pain responses has received […]

Rapid storage and retrieval of genomic intervals from a relational database system using nested containment lists.
Wiley LK, Sivley RM, Bush WS,. Efficient storage and retrieval of genomic annotations based on range intervals is necessary, given the amount of data produced by next-generation sequencing studies. The indexing strategies of relational database systems (such as MySQL) greatly inhibit their use in genomic annotation tasks. This has led to the development of stand-alone […]

Putting pleiotropy and selection into context defines a new paradigm for interpreting genetic data.
Predazzi IM, Rokas A, Deinard A, Schnetz-Boutaud N, Williams ND, Bush WS, Tacconelli A, Friedrich K, Fazio S, Novelli G, Haines JL, Sirugo G, Williams SM,. Natural selection shapes many human genes, including some related to complex diseases. Understanding how selection affects genes, especially pleiotropic ones, may be important in evaluating disease associations and the […]
Recent Publications
- Pillai, JA, Bebek, G, Khrestian, M, Bena, J, Bergmann, CC, Bush, WS, Leverenz, JB, Bekris, LM. TNFRSF1B Gene Variants and Related Soluble TNFR2 Levels Impact Resilience in Alzheimer's Disease. Front Aging Neurosci 2021; 13 : 638922. PubMed PMID:33716716 PubMed Central PMC7947258.
- Huynh-Le, MP, Fan, CC, Karunamuni, R, Thompson, WK, Martinez, ME, Eeles, RA, Kote-Jarai, Z, Muir, K, Schleutker, J, Pashayan, N et al.. Polygenic hazard score is associated with prostate cancer in multi-ethnic populations. Nat Commun 2021; 12 (1): 1236. PubMed PMID:33623038 PubMed Central PMC7902617.
- Conti, DV, Darst, BF, Moss, LC, Saunders, EJ, Sheng, X, Chou, A, Schumacher, FR, Olama, AAA, Benlloch, S, Dadaev, T et al.. Publisher Correction: Trans-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analysis of prostate cancer identifies new susceptibility loci and informs genetic risk prediction. Nat Genet 2021; 53 (3): 413. PubMed PMID:33473200 .
- Stein, CM, Benchek, P, Bartlett, J, Igo, RP, Sobota, RS, Chervenak, K, Mayanja-Kizza, H, von Reyn, CF, Lahey, T, Bush, WS et al.. Methylome-wide analysis reveals epigenetic marks associated with resistance to tuberculosis in HIV-infected individuals from East Africa. J Infect Dis 2021; : . PubMed PMID:33400784 .
- Conti, DV, Darst, BF, Moss, LC, Saunders, EJ, Sheng, X, Chou, A, Schumacher, FR, Olama, AAA, Benlloch, S, Dadaev, T et al.. Trans-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analysis of prostate cancer identifies new susceptibility loci and informs genetic risk prediction. Nat Genet 2021; 53 (1): 65-75. PubMed PMID:33398198 .
- Liu, LY, Bush, WS, Koyutürk, M, Karakurt, G. Interplay between traumatic brain injury and intimate partner violence: data driven analysis utilizing electronic health records. BMC Womens Health 2020; 20 (1): 269. PubMed PMID:33287806 PubMed Central PMC7720451.
- Cooke Bailey, JN, Bush, WS, Crawford, DC. Editorial: The Importance of Diversity in Precision Medicine Research. Front Genet 2020; 11 : 875. PubMed PMID:33005167 PubMed Central PMC7479241.
- Karunamuni, RA, Huynh-Le, MP, Fan, CC, Thompson, W, Eeles, RA, Kote-Jarai, Z, Muir, K, UKGPCS Collaborators, Lophatananon, A, Tangen, CM et al.. African-specific improvement of a polygenic hazard score for age at diagnosis of prostate cancer. Int J Cancer 2021; 148 (1): 99-105. PubMed PMID:32930425 .
- Tang, ZZ, Sliwoski, GR, Chen, G, Jin, B, Bush, WS, Li, B, Capra, JA. PSCAN: Spatial scan tests guided by protein structures improve complex disease gene discovery and signal variant detection. Genome Biol 2020; 21 (1): 217. PubMed PMID:32847609 PubMed Central PMC7448521.
- Dumitrescu, L, Mahoney, ER, Mukherjee, S, Lee, ML, Bush, WS, Engelman, CD, Lu, Q, Fardo, DW, Trittschuh, EH, Mez, J et al.. Genetic variants and functional pathways associated with resilience to Alzheimer's disease. Brain 2020; 143 (8): 2561-2575. PubMed PMID:32844198 PubMed Central PMC7447518.