Dr. Burchard is Harry Wm. and Diana V. Hind Distinguished Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences Professor and Vice Chair, Departments of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences and Medicine Director, Center for Genes, Environments & Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Burchard's laboratory investigates the genetic basis for differences in response to treatment for asthma. Dr. Burchard's laboratory is specifically interested in identifying "ethnic-specific" genetic and biologic risk factors for asthma, asthma severity, and drug responsiveness among US ethnic and racial minority groups as well as developing and applying statistical methods to admixed populations. Dr. Burchard is Principal Investigator of Gene-Environment Studies of Asthma in Hispanic/Latino Children (GALA) I and II among other NIH-funded studies. In March 2015, Dr. Burchard was named to the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director. More recently, Dr. Burchard was awarded the 2016 American Thoracic Society Innovations in Health Equality - Lifetime Achievement Award.
Recent Publications
- Zhang, X, Brody, JA, Graff, M, Highland, HM, Chami, N, Xu, H, Wang, Z, Ferrier, KR, Chittoor, G, Josyula, NS et al.. Whole genome sequencing analysis of body mass index identifies novel African ancestry-specific risk allele. Nat Commun 2025; 16 (1): 3470. PubMed PMID:40216759 PubMed Central PMC11992084.
- Choi, SH, Jurgens, SJ, Xiao, L, Hill, MC, Haggerty, CM, Sveinbjörnsson, G, Morrill, VN, Marston, NA, Weng, LC, Pirruccello, JP et al.. Sequencing in over 50,000 cases identifies coding and structural variation underlying atrial fibrillation risk. Nat Genet 2025; 57 (3): 548-562. PubMed PMID:40050430 .
- Orchard, P, Blackwell, TW, Kachuri, L, Castaldi, PJ, Cho, MH, Christenson, SA, Durda, P, Gabriel, S, Hersh, CP, Huntsman, S et al.. Cross-cohort analysis of expression and splicing quantitative trait loci in TOPMed. medRxiv 2025; : . PubMed PMID:40034763 PubMed Central PMC11875316.
- Li, X, Chen, H, Selvaraj, MS, Van Buren, E, Zhou, H, Wang, Y, Sun, R, McCaw, ZR, Yu, Z, Jiang, MZ et al.. A statistical framework for multi-trait rare variant analysis in large-scale whole-genome sequencing studies. Nat Comput Sci 2025; 5 (2): 125-143. PubMed PMID:39920506 PubMed Central PMC11981678.
- Jerez, PÁ, Wild Crea, PA, Ramos, DM, Gustavsson, EK, Radefeldt, M, Makarious, MB, Ojo, OO, Billingsley, KJ, Malik, L, Daida, K et al.. African ancestry neurodegeneration risk variant disrupts an intronic branchpoint in GBA1. medRxiv 2024; : . PubMed PMID:39802803 PubMed Central PMC11722498.
- Álvarez Jerez, P, Wild Crea, P, Ramos, DM, Gustavsson, EK, Radefeldt, M, Damianov, A, Makarious, MB, Ojo, OO, Billingsley, KJ, Malik, L et al.. African ancestry neurodegeneration risk variant disrupts an intronic branchpoint in GBA1. Nat Struct Mol Biol 2024; 31 (12): 1955-1963. PubMed PMID:39668204 PubMed Central PMC11638064.
- Gorla, A, Witonsky, J, Elhawary, JR, Chen, ZJ, Mefford, J, Perez-Garcia, J, Huntsman, S, Hu, D, Eng, C, Woodruff, PG et al.. Epigenetic patient stratification via contrastive machine learning refines hallmark biomarkers in minoritized children with asthma. Res Sq 2024; : . PubMed PMID:39315258 PubMed Central PMC11419268.
- Walker, MT, Bloodworth, JC, Kountz, TS, McCarty, SL, Green, JE, Ferrie, RP, Campbell, JA, Averill, SH, Beckman, KB, Grammer, LC et al.. 5-HTP inhibits eosinophilia via intracellular endothelial 5-HTRs; SNPs in 5-HTRs associate with asthmatic lung function. Front Allergy 2024; 5 : 1385168. PubMed PMID:38845678 PubMed Central PMC11153829.
- Keener, R, Chhetri, SB, Connelly, CJ, Taub, MA, Conomos, MP, Weinstock, J, Ni, B, Strober, B, Aslibekyan, S, Auer, PL et al.. Validation of human telomere length multi-ancestry meta-analysis association signals identifies POP5 and KBTBD6 as human telomere length regulation genes. Nat Commun 2024; 15 (1): 4417. PubMed PMID:38789417 PubMed Central PMC11126610.
- Diao, JA, He, Y, Khazanchi, R, Nguemeni Tiako, MJ, Witonsky, JI, Pierson, E, Rajpurkar, P, Elhawary, JR, Melas-Kyriazi, L, Yen, A et al.. Implications of Race Adjustment in Lung-Function Equations. N Engl J Med 2024; 390 (22): 2083-2097. PubMed PMID:38767252 PubMed Central PMC11305821.
