
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

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 […]

A small number of candidate gene SNPs reveal continental ancestry in African Americans.
Kodaman N, Aldrich MC, Smith JR, Signorello LB, Bradley K, Breyer J, Cohen SS, Long J, Cai Q, Giles J, Bush WS, Blot WJ, Matthews CE, Williams SM,. Using genetic data from an obesity candidate gene study of self-reported African Americans and European Americans, we investigated the number of Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) and candidate […]

A comparison of cataloged variation between International HapMap Consortium and 1000 Genomes Project data.
Buchanan CC, Torstenson ES, Bush WS, Ritchie MD,. Since publication of the human genome in 2003, geneticists have been interested in risk variant associations to resolve the etiology of traits and complex diseases. The International HapMap Consortium undertook an effort to catalog all common variation across the genome (variants with a minor allele frequency (MAF) […]

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. […]

A knowledge-driven interaction analysis reveals potential neurodegenerative mechanism of multiple sclerosis susceptibility.
Bush WS, McCauley JL, DeJager PL, Dudek SM, Hafler DA, Gibson RA, Matthews PM, Kappos L, Naegelin Y, Polman CH, Hauser SL, Oksenberg J, Haines JL, Ritchie MD, ,. Gene-gene interactions are proposed as an important component of the genetic architecture of complex diseases, and are just beginning to be evaluated in the context of […]
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.