Alison Motsinger-Reif

Motsinger-Reif was a lab technician in the department of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University from 1997 to 2000. Her advisor was James E. Smith. She worked as a research assistant with Derya Unutmaz at Vanderbilt University from 2000 to 2003. She earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences (2002), M.S. in Applied Statistics (2006) and Ph.D. in Human Genetics (2007) at Vanderbilt University studying with Marylyn Ritchie.^[1]

She held varying faculty roles at North Carolina State University from 2007 to 2018 including professor of statistics and biostatistics core director.^[1] On December 10, 2018, she joined National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) as chief of the Biostatistics & Computational Biology Branch.^[1][2] Her group focuses on the development and application of modern statistical approaches for understanding the etiology of common, complex diseases.^[3] Her lab also applies statistical approaches to evolution where she develops tree models and algorithms to detect discovery rates.^[4] She conducts association analyses looking at large-scale genetics and genomics data to find genetic factors that predict complex disease, and responses to drugs and environmental chemicals.^[2]