Earlier this summer, Marcelo Nóbrega, MD, PhD, became Chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, taking over from Carole Ober, who had led the department for the past 16 years.
Nóbrega, the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Human Genetics, is a globally respected investigator whose work has deepened understanding of how noncoding regions of the genome influence gene regulation and human disease. By combining functional genomics, computational biology, and experimental approaches, his research has provided important insights into how genetic variation contributes to complex traits. This work is helping to advance the field of precision medicine and expand opportunities for therapeutic innovation.
He is also a highly regarded mentor who has served as Chair of the Committee on Genetics, Genomics, and Systems Biology, and as Dean for Faculty Affairs for Basic Science. We spoke to him recently about his plans for the department as he begins his tenure.
What are you looking forward to as department chair after serving in more institutional training and faculty development roles?
One of the defining aspects of human genetics at UChicago is that the faculty has always been very cohesive. We are a group of people who think together and express our opinions. Often there's dissent, but at the end we brainstorm and come to an agreement about issues that range from who we want to recruit for our faculty to what are the important areas that we want to grow in the department. So, there's really a storied aspect of this department in how there's this collegiality among the faculty.
When the opportunity arose to become the new chair, I thought that this was not going to be a hard job because whoever stepped up was going to get a department that is doing well. We are a reference point in human genetics, nationally and internationally. We are one of the top departments, and we are not at a juncture where we have to find our soul or define our vision. It will be more like taking the baton from Carole after 16 years and continuing to run, to make sure that we stay at the top and keep at the forefront of human genetics.
What are the immediate opportunities as you think about the direction of the department?
There's a lot of stress on collaborative work across departments and divisions at the University, and many of my colleagues and I feel that this is a real opportunity for genetics, which is a fundamental aspect of biology that can be applied to anything. So, for example, when you think about how we are connected to a hospital and a medical system, genetics is pervasive in all specialties. There are genetic conditions for everything. So, one of the things that we are interested in doing is translational research and getting closer to clinical units at the BSD.
As we grow the department, we’re going to try to pay attention to the possibility of recruiting scientists who can bridge multiple departments. It may be other basic science departments as we've done in the past, but we are especially invested now in seeking people who are interested in disease processes. That may be areas like neurology, cardiology, or nephrology, and we already have faculty who are doing this, which is aligned with the mission of the division to promote more of these interdepartmental connections. As you spread the expertise, people will have access to more clinical data. And because we're talking about genetics, our clinical partners would have access to state-of-the-art analytical tools and insights that are developed in this department and used all over the world.
What are some of the exciting developments in the field of genetics that you’d like to explore?
We already have strengths in three major areas: population genetics, evolutionary and statistical genetics, and gene regulation. We have top faculty in all three of these areas, so we want to continue to support them and make sure that they continue to be topical and at the top of their field.
There are other areas, for example, experimental laboratories, where we would love to bring in more people who do high-throughput genomics and can manipulate large numbers of genes in multiple cell types and models. One of the common themes of genomics nowadays is the pervasive use of very large data sets. We would like to recruit more people who are able to sift through publicly available clinical data sets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of genomes already available and try to identify genetic signatures that characterize diseases or stratify patients to know how well they respond to specific treatments or how their disease will progress.
We also want to jump on the bandwagon of AI. Of course, we already have people who are working with AI like everybody else, but we would like to recruit somebody who is specifically trained to use AI to rapidly speed up the way that we do analysis. I was just reading a report from somebody that I know saying that about 15 years ago when he sequenced a human genome, it took a group of 30 people nine months to do the analysis. Just a couple of months ago, he took his own genome, put it in one of these new AI tools, and it did exactly the same thing in 30 minutes. So, that's the power that these tools will have for us to do analysis that we could never dream of doing before. We need to position ourselves, and many other departments are probably thinking about this as well, to use AI as a formidable tool to help us generate hypotheses, analyze data, and even carry out pilot experiments that you can then validate in laboratories. Those are the areas that we anticipate growing in the next five years.
What does success for the department look like over those next five years?
One of the things that became clear for us was that despite the department being in such good shape, it is still relatively small. So, I think that my major goal and challenge is to carefully think among ourselves about how we’re going to use the recruitment slots we’ve been given to bring in new blood who are working at the next frontier of genetics research, and how we can start integrating ourselves better with the rest of the division. Again, thanks to Carole Ober’s work as chair for the last 16 years, I'm very lucky to be in a position where everybody's successful and everybody's doing well. So, we will be building on a really strong basis.
Finally, a more personal question about your career: Why did you want to become a scientist?
I grew up in Brazil, and there we go straight from high school to college. I was 16 years old when I started medical school. I liked biology and I thought I wanted to be a doctor, and from the outset, I loved research. I volunteered in laboratories, and I enjoyed doing this. But when I got to the clinics, much to my chagrin, I realized that working with patients was not for me.
But I continued to like the research, so I finished medical school and did my internship, but I wanted to do a PhD. I was accepted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in its Physiology PhD program. This is one of the things that has been formidable about scientific education in this country. This was 30 years ago, and that was the beginning. At that point, I never again saw a patient, so I don't say that I'm a doctor even though I went to medical school. I like to study diseases, and I want to keep working and collaborating with others who study the mechanisms of disease.
