“Bringing Genomics to Clinical Medicine: Looking through rose-colored glasses while wearing green eyeshades”

As a board-certified internist and medical geneticist, Robert L. Nussbaum has dedicated his career to improving the care of adults and children with hereditary disorders. He received his training in medicine in the Harvard-MIT Joint Program in Health Technology, his internal medicine training at Barnes Hospital at Washington University, and his genetics training at Baylor College of Medicine. Prior to his service at UCSF, he served for 12 years as Chief of the Genetic Disease Research and Inherited Disease Research Branches at NIH, and was an HHMI Associate Investigator, and Professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is board certified in internal medicine, clinical genetics and clinical molecular genetics. Dr. Nussbaum directed the original research that led to the discovery of mutations in a-synuclein in hereditary Parkinson disease in the mid 1990's and has been studying its role in Parkinson disease ever since. For his work on Parkinson disease, he was awarded the Klaus Joachim Zulch Prize for Neurological Research and the Jay Van Andel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Parkinson's Disease Research. He has also been recognized three times with awards from the Lowe Syndrome Association.

Dr. Nussbaum has received numerous teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania, the National Human Genome Research Institute and the University of California, San Francisco. He has served on the Board of Directors of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and on the board of the American Society of Human Genetics. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2004, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.