Karen Curtin (PhD, MStat) is an associate research professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Genetic Epidemiology) and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine and the John A. Moran Eye Center, Sharon Eccles Steele Center for Translational Medicine. She serves as Associate Director of Pedigree & Population Resource at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, the group that administers the Utah Population Database (the UPDB). In this capacity, she collaborates as a genetic and risk factor epidemiologist with investigators across the Health Sciences Center in addition to pursuing her own research interests. Dr. Curtin is a Huntsman Cancer Institute investigator and member of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences program, with a keen interest in the interaction of environmental, lifestyle, and genetic risk factors in the development of common, complex disease using unique research resources available in the state of Utah.   Her wide array of research interests and experience in research infrastructure and project development have resulted in cross-disciplinary collaborations that include an investigation partnering with the College of Pharmacy and Intermountain Healthcare clinicians to investigate a statewide cohort of amphetamine-type stimulant users to examine the incidence of Parkinson's disease. She is undertaking a study to use electronic databases to identify a subset of colorectal adenomas (sessile serrated polyps), of which little is known at the population level. It is thought these lesions are associated with missed or ‘interval’ cancers, but studies to date have been small, clinic-based investigations. She is currently funded to investigate novel areas of mammographic breast density in relation to breast cancer, the familiality breast density in a large Utah cohort of women and the association of tamoxifen treatment with breast density and breast cancer recurrence and metastatic progression. The research directly relates to cancer prevention by potentially informing screening recommendations and may provide further evidence of the role of genetics in breast density, a known risk factor for breast cancer and will utilize UPDB information linked to University and Intermountain records including complex radiology and pharmacy data.   Curtin received her PhD in biomedical informatics with an emphasis in genetic epidemiology from the University of Utah. She received post-doctoral training in molecular, genetic, and risk factor epidemiology of cancer at the University of Utah. Prior to receiving her PhD, she was a Masters level biostatistician on large externally-funded cancer studies. She received the 2008 John D. Morgan Fellowship Award in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. A prolific and extensively published researcher, she recently received recognition from Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a high-impact peer-reviewed journal, for one of the 20 most frequently cited articles of 2009. Dr. Curtin is a member of the American Society of Human Genetics, the American Association for Cancer Research and the International Genetic Epidemiology Society.

Gene-Environment Interaction Cancer Epidemiology with Emphasis on Colorectal Cancer Environmental Pollution Epigenetics in Cancer Age-related macular degeneration and co-segregating diseases