Kwangsik Nho, PhD
knho@iupui.edu
Kwangsik Nho, PhD, is Showalter Scholar Associate Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) and a member of the Indiana ADRC, the IU Center for Neuroimaging, the IU Network Science Institute, BioHealth Informatics, and the IU Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He has served as Co-core Leader of the Genetics Core of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). He co-leads the Neuroimaging Genomics Lab in the IU Center for Neuroimaging. His PhD is in computational physics, and during his graduate school and postdoctoral years, he carried out extensive research in the broad areas of computational and theoretical physics, later refocusing his career on biomedical informatics. His research expertise is in the areas of bioinformatics, imaging informatics, and medical informatics. His career goal is to integrate bio- medical and imaging informatics strategies to systematically explore relationships between multi-omics (genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) and brain pathology measured from multi-modal imaging (MRI and PET) and biofluids in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As an example of his innovative research, Dr. Nho reported novel functional risk and protective variants (REST, PARP1, and CARD10) in protein-coding regions associated with hippocampal atrophy rate measured by MRI using an extreme-trait design and whole exome sequencing. This was among the first uses of whole exome sequencing in AD. Dr. Nho completed a NIH NLM K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and is presently PI of a NIH R01 grant award for integrating biomedical and imaging informatics strategies to further identify genetic factors associated with multimodal biomarkers of AD risk and progression in multi-omics data. He is also the MPI of a large international U01 grant award and large-scale multi-omics U19 grant award and the Co-Investigator in 10 grants. Dr. Nho has been a leader in early quality control procedures and analysis of WGS, RNA-Seq, miRNA-Seq, DNA methylation, and metabolomics data in the ADNI and other consortia.