University of Washington: Debbie Nickerson

Debbie Nickerson died last week at the age of 67 after a brief illness. She was a professor at the University of Washington's Department of Genome Sciences, of which she was a founding member, and the leader of the university's Northwest Genomics Center. She also led UW's center for the National Institutes of Health Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program and UW's Center for Mendelian Genomics. In addition, her team has been a main contributor to the NIH's All of Us Research program. She was also a researcher at the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine. Nickerson held a BA from Adelphi College and a PhD from the University of Tennessee. In the 1980s, she joined Leroy Hood's lab at Caltech and in 1992, she become an assistant professor of molecular biotechnology at UW.