Elaine Ostrander

Recently, Ostrander has undertaken a large study aimed at understanding how the nearly 500 breeds which exist worldwide were each formed, and how they relate to one another. This work has revealed secrets of early breed formation as well as new findings regarding human population migration. In 2019 she published the analysis of 722 canine whole genome sequences, looking at 144 modern breeds, 54 wild canids and 100 village dogs. This documented over 91 million SNPs and small indels, creating a large catalog of genomic variation for the species.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

Ostrander has also served in an advisory capacity on behalf of leading professional societies, journals, and other scientific efforts in the United States, Belgium, Sweden, and others. Ostrander is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and, in 2013, she was inducted as a Fellow. She is a member of the American Society of Human Genetics, the American Genetic Association, the American Association for Cancer Research, Women in Cancer Research, the Genetics Society of America, and the Association for Women in Science. Ostrander served a term on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics and in 2013 received the Genetics Society of America medal.

Ostrander has presented her research at national and international scientific meetings, as well as given many distinguished named lectures. In 2011, she was named NIH Distinguished Investigator. She is the author of nearly 350 scientific publications that have been cited more than 18,000 times, including more than 1,200 citations to the 2005 paper she co-authored describing the genome sequence of the domestic dog.

Ostrander holds two U.S. patents: Application 20100217534 Patent Number (20110224911) and Application 200901762555, both related to genetic identification of dog breeds.

Elaine Ann Ostrander is an American geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. She holds a number of professional academic appointments, currently serving as Distinguished and Senior Investigator and head of the NHGRI Section of Comparative Genomics; and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch. She is known for her research on prostate cancer susceptibility in humans and for conducting genetic investigations with the Canis familiaris —the domestic dog— model, which she has used to study disease susceptibility and frequency and other aspects of natural variation across mammals. In 2007, her laboratory showed that much of the variation in body size of domestic dogs is due to sequence changes in a single gene encoding a growth-promoting protein.

She came to the NIH in 2004. At NHGRI, she holds a number of professional academic appointments, serving as Distinguished Investigator, Senior Scientist and Head of the Section of Comparative Genetics, and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch. She has been an NCI, DOD, DOE and NHGRI grant recipient.

In 1999, Ostrander was awarded the President's Award by the American Kennel Club Canine Health Foundation, followed by the AKC Canine Health Foundation Asa Mays Award for Excellence in Canine Health Research (2005) and, in 2013, she was the Lifetime Achievement Winner of the International Canine Health Award. She is also the recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics (2000) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Weill Cornell Medical College's Prostate Cancer Institute (2011). In 2013, she won the Genetics Society of America Medal in recognition of her research on the genetic basis of phenotypic variation between dog breeds and on genome-wide associations in human cancers. She was also the recipient of the NIH Oxford Cambridge Scholars Mentorship Award in 2017.

Ostrander received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1987, she was awarded a Ph.D. from the Oregon Health Sciences University (now known as the Oregon Health & Science University) in Portland. She completed post-doctoral training in molecular biology at Harvard. From 1991–1993, she was a staff scientist in the Genetics and Human Genome Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. At Berkeley, she worked in the laboratory of Jasper Rine, where the dog genome project originated.

Ostrander was born in Syracuse, New York in 1958. Her father was a librarian and her mother was a school administrator. The family lived in New York, New Jersey, Nebraska, and then Washington. She has a sister and a brother, marine biologist Gary Ostrander. She attended high school at Eisenhower High School (Yakima, Washington).