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

Genetic analysis of biological pathway data through genomic randomization.

Yaspan BL, Bush WS, Torstenson ES, Ma D, Pericak-Vance MA, Ritchie MD, Sutcliffe JS, Haines JL,. Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) are a standard approach for large-scale common variation characterization and for identification of single loci predisposing to disease. However, due to issues of moderate sample sizes and particularly multiple testing correction, many variants of […]

Multivariate analysis of regulatory SNPs: empowering personal genomics by considering cis-epistasis and heterogeneity.

Turner SD, Bush WS,. Understanding how genetic variants impact the regulation and expression of genes is important for forging mechanistic links between variants and phenotypes in personal genomics studies. In this work, we investigate statistical interactions among variants that alter gene expression and identify 79 genes showing highly significant interaction effects consistent with genetic heterogeneity. […]

Genome simulation approaches for synthesizing in silico datasets for human genomics.

Ritchie MD, Bush WS,. Simulated data is a necessary first step in the evaluation of new analytic methods because in simulated data the true effects are known. To successfully develop novel statistical and computational methods for genetic analysis, it is vital to simulate datasets consisting of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spread throughout the genome at […]

Visualizing SNP statistics in the context of linkage disequilibrium using LD-Plus.

Bush WS, Dudek SM, Ritchie MD,. Often in human genetic analysis, multiple tables of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) statistics are shown alongside a Haploview style correlation plot. Readers are then asked to make inferences that incorporate knowledge across these multiple sets of results. To better facilitate a collective understanding of all available data, we developed […]

Recent Publications

  1. Durodoye, RO, Ciesielski, TH, Benchek, P, Bartlett, J, Zhu, X, Liu, S, Naj, A, Kunkle, B, Schellenberg, GD, Mayeux, R et al.. Deviations from additivity in APOE4-mediated late-onset Alzheimer's disease risk across races and ethnicities. Hum Genet 2026; 145 (1): 16. PubMed PMID:41569459 PubMed Central PMC12827419.
  2. Durant, A, Mukherjee, S, Lee, ML, Choi, SE, Scollard, P, Klinedinst, BS, Trittschuh, EH, Mez, J, Farrer, LA, Gifford, KA et al.. Evaluating the association of apolipoprotein E genotype and cognitive resilience in SuperAgers. Alzheimers Dement 2026; 22 (1): e71024. PubMed PMID:41542929 PubMed Central PMC12809718.
  3. Khurshid, Z, Farrell, JJ, Tong, T, Zhu, C, Alzheimer's Disease Sequencing Project, Martin, ER, Bush, W, Pericak-Vance, MA, Wang, LS, Schellenberg, G et al.. Multi-ancestry exome-wide study identifies variants associated with Alzheimer's disease protection. J Alzheimers Dis 2025; : 13872877251405497. PubMed PMID:41428483 .
  4. Ray, NR, Kurup, J, Kumar, A, Rajabli, F, Wang, L, Xu, W, Jin, F, Yilmaz, E, Kizil, C, Bertholim-Nasciben, L et al.. Local genetic correlation analysis of Alzheimer's disease and stroke implicates PHLPP1 as a shared locus in individuals of African ancestry. medRxiv 2025; : . PubMed PMID:41404293 PubMed Central PMC12704622.
  5. 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's Disease. bioRxiv 2025; : . PubMed PMID:41279621 PubMed Central PMC12637479.
  6. Mustafa, Y, Main, LR, Mews, M, Janve, VA, Hohman, TJ, Haines, JL, Song, YE, Griswold, AJ, Pericak-Vance, MA, Scott, WK et al.. Monocyte inflammation and resilience to Alzheimer's disease: novel genetic risk genes identified by transcriptome-wide association study. Transl Psychiatry 2025; 15 (1): 481. PubMed PMID:41253753 PubMed Central PMC12627486.
  7. Gorski, M, Grunin, M, Herold, JM, Fröhlich, B, Behr, M, Wheeler, N, Bush, WS, Song, YE, Zhu, X, Blanton, SH et al.. Diverse-Ancestry GWAS of Age-Related Macular Degeneration on 16,108 Examined Cases and 18,038 Controls. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 2025; 66 (13): 51. PubMed PMID:41159651 PubMed Central PMC12577769.
  8. Cukier, HN, DeRosa, BA, Coombs, LE, Tang, E, Leyva, DR, Lazzaro, AR, Gu, E, Dykxhoorn, DM, Haines, JL, Pericak-Vance, MA et al.. Generation of two isogenic induced pluripotent stem cell lines derived from a Hispanic individual with Alzheimer's Disease and mosaic for loss of the Y chromosome. Stem Cell Res 2025; 89 : 103851. PubMed PMID:41086611 PubMed Central PMC12818727.
  9. Kurniansyah, N, Tasaki, S, Rehman, H, Zhu, C, Farrell, J, Sherva, R, Hauger, R, Merritt, VC, Panizzon, M, Zhang, R et al.. A multi-ancestry polygenic risk score for Alzheimer disease is associated with cognitive decline, hippocampal atrophy and neuropathological hallmarks in diverse populations. medRxiv 2025; : . PubMed PMID:41040715 PubMed Central PMC12486013.
  10. Bledsoe, X, Wang, TC, Wu, Y, Archer, D, Chen, HH, Naj, A, Bush, WS, Hohman, TJ, Dumitrescu, L, Below, JE et al.. Neuroimaging PheWAS and molecular phenotyping implicate PSMC3 in Alzheimer's Disease. medRxiv 2025; : . PubMed PMID:41001458 PubMed Central PMC12458493.
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