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.

Affiliations

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Featured Publications

ICD-9 tobacco use codes are effective identifiers of smoking status.

Wiley LK, Shah A, Xu H, Bush WS,. To evaluate the validity of, characterize the usage of, and propose potential research applications for International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) tobacco codes in clinical populations.Using data on cancer cases and cancer-free controls from Vanderbilt’s biorepository, BioVU, we evaluated the utility of ICD-9 tobacco use codes […]

Interrogating the complex role of chromosome 16p13.13 in multiple sclerosis susceptibility: independent genetic signals in the CIITA-CLEC16A-SOCS1 gene complex.

Zuvich RL, Bush WS, McCauley JL, Beecham AH, De Jager PL, , Ivinson AJ, Compston A, Hafler DA, Hauser SL, Sawcer SJ, Pericak-Vance MA, Barcellos LF, Mortlock DP, Haines JL,. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative, autoimmune disease of the central nervous system, and numerous studies have shown that MS has a strong genetic component. […]

Recent Publications

  1. Olayinka, O, Farrell, JJ, Zhu, C, Khurshid, Z, Alzheimer's Disease Sequencing Project, Martin, ER, Bush, WS, Pericak-Vance, MA, Wang, LS, Schellenberg, GD et al.. Stratification by a polygenic risk score of common variation aids in Alzheimer's disease rare variant discovery. Alzheimers Dement 2026; 22 (8): e71710. PubMed PMID:42557982 PubMed Central PMC13444717.
  2. Cruz-Gonzalez, S, Okpala, O, Gu, E, Gomez, L, Mews, M, Vance, JM, Cuccaro, ML, Cornejo-Olivas, MR, Feliciano-Astacio, BE, Byrd, GS et al.. Methylation clocks fail to generalize across genetically admixed individuals. Elife 2026; 14 : . PubMed PMID:42550597 PubMed Central PMC13436966.
  3. Sun, X, Mews, M, Wheeler, NR, Benchek, P, Gu, T, Gomez, L, Mustafa, Y, Wang, LS, Leung, YY, Schellenberg, GD et al.. Evaluating sequence-to-function deep learning models for ancestry-stratified regulatory variant effect prediction using multi-ancestry blood eQTLs. bioRxiv 2026; : . PubMed PMID:42395544 PubMed Central PMC13320881.
  4. Wang, TC, Archer, DB, Ali, M, Wu, Y, Mormino, E, Buckley, RF, Lee, AJ, Saykin, AJ, De Jager, PL, Schneider, JA et al.. Combining post-mortem and neuroimaging measures of brain amyloidosis to accelerate genomic discovery. Brain 2026; : . PubMed PMID:42334898 .
  5. Liu, C, Zhu, Z, Lin, H, Bush, WS, Jenq, RR, Cominelli, F, Pillai, JA, Haines, JL, Zhu, X, Xu, R et al.. The gut-brain axis in Alzheimer's disease: early detection, microbial metabolites, mechanisms, and therapeutic opportunities. Front Mol Biosci 2026; 13 : 1735332. PubMed PMID:42325435 PubMed Central PMC13275447.
  6. Rose, CM, Bush, WS, Beno, MF, Williams, SM, Haines, JL, Crawford, DC. Leadership, Informatics Expertise, and Resources: Determinants of Institutional Data Sharing in the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C). AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc 2026; 2026 : 381-389. PubMed PMID:42317826 PubMed Central PMC13274281.
  7. Sun, X, Mews, M, Wheeler, NR, Benchek, P, Gu, T, Gomez, L, Ray, N, Reitz, C, Naj, AC, Below, JE et al.. Multi-ancestry transcriptome-wide association study reveals shared and population-specific genetic effects in Alzheimer disease. Am J Hum Genet 2026; 113 (6): 1279-1296. PubMed PMID:42066773 PubMed Central PMC13247992.
  8. Ray, NR, Kurup, J, Kumar, A, Rajabli, F, Wang, L, Xu, W, Jin, F, Yilmaz, E, Kizil, C, Bertholim-Nasciben, L et al.. Genetic correlation analysis of Alzheimer's disease and stroke implicates PHLPP1 as a shared locus in individuals of African ancestry. Alzheimers Dement 2026; 22 (4): e71433. PubMed PMID:42043782 PubMed Central PMC13116102.
  9. Eissman, JM, Regelson, AN, Walters, S, Archer, DB, Durant, A, Mukherjee, S, Lee, ML, Choi, SE, Scollard, P, Trittschuh, EH et al.. Sex-specific genetic drivers of memory, executive functioning and language in older adults. Brain 2026; : . PubMed PMID:41989867 .
  10. Liu, S, Bush, WS, Kunkle, BW, Byrd, GS, Reitz, C, Tosto, G, Rajabli, F, Caban-Holt, AM, Cuccaro, M, Starks, T et al.. Dissecting Alzheimer's disease heritability across populations. Alzheimers Dement 2026; 22 (3): e71236. PubMed PMID:41880092 PubMed Central PMC13093350.
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