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[1] and a professor in comparative genomics at
Uppsala University.[2] In 2010 she co-founded
Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) 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.[3] She has researched extensively on the genetics of
dogs, identifying genes and
genetic variants important in disease susceptibility, morphology and behavior.[1]
Lindblad-Toh was born 1970 in
Stockholm, Sweden. She studied
molecular biology as an
undergraduate at
Karolinska Institute.[5] In 1998, 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.[6] In 2002, she co-authored the paper describing the initial genome sequence of the mouse,[7] and in 2005 she published the first genome sequence of the domestic dog.[8]