Kerstin Lindblad-Toh


Kerstin Lindblad-Toh is a scientist in comparative genomics, specializing in mammalian genetics. She is the Scientific Director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute and a professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University. In 2010 she co-founded Science for Life Laboratory together with Mathias Uhlén and acted as Co-Director until 2015. As the leader of the Broad Institute's Mammalian Genome Initiative she has led the effort to sequence and analyze the genomes of various mammals, including mouse, dog, chimpanzee, horse, rabbit and opossum. She has researched extensively on the genetics of dogs, identifying genes and genetic variants important in disease susceptibility, morphology and behavior.
Lindblad-Toh is elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Education and early career

Lindblad-Toh was born 1970 in Sweden. She studied molecular biology as an undergraduate at Karolinska Institute. In 1988, she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institute. She worked on several projects as a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research together with Eric Lander, including mouse SNP discovery, the development of genotyping technologies and association studies in human disease. In 2002, she co-authored the paper describing the initial genome sequence of the mouse, and in 2005 she published the first genome sequence of the domestic dog.

Awards and honors