About Us

Dr. Klein is the Principal Investigator for the PharmGKB and Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Medicine. Dr. Klein is also the Co-Principal Investigator for CPIC (Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium). She was recruited from the University of California, San Francisco faculty and was the Director of the PharmGKB since it began in April 2000 until September 2019. Teri received her PhD in medical information sciences from the University of California, San Francisco and a BA in biology/chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to becoming the director of the PharmGKB in 2000, Dr. Klein was an Associate Adjunct Professor at UCSF.

Dr. Whirl-Carrillo is the Co-Principal Investigator and Director of the PharmGKB. She has been in the pharmacogenomics (PGx) field for over twenty years and is, or has been, part of a multitude of collaborative projects that leverage structured PGx knowledge for the advancement of personalized medicine. Her research interests include the development of manual and automated curation processes for annotating scientific literature; creation and application of terminologies, definitions and rule-based systems to PGx knowledge to aid computational data analysis and clinical implementation; and automated methods to annotate genotype and sequence data for translation to PGx-based therapeutic recommendations. Michelle received her PhD in Biophysics from Stanford University and her SB in Biology from MIT.

Li is a Senior Scientific Curator in the Department of Biomedical Data Science. She joined PharmGKB in 2007. Prior to this, Li worked as a senior scientist at Iconix Biosciences Inc. working on microarray data analysis, biomarker discovery and curation for the development of DrugMatrixR toxicogenomics database. She holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Microbiology from Tufts University School of Medicine, and a BS in Microbiology from Beijing University, P.R. China.

Katrin is a Senior Scientific Curator in the Department of Biomedical Data Science and has been working for the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB) since 2008. Before joining the PharmGKB team, Katrin was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Reproductive Biology & Program for Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University Leipzig, Germany working in the field of GPCRs and signal transduction.

Caroline has been a Scientific Curator since 2003, when she first joined the PharmGKB. She took two hiatuses when her children were born and spent a brief time as a Senior Program Administrator for the American Association for Cancer Research and returned to the PharmGKB in 2015. She has a PhD in Genetics from Trinity College University of Dublin, BSc Hons in Biochemistry from University of Bath UK and did postdoctoral training at University of Pennsylvania in Pharmacology and pharmacogenomics. She has been a lecturer on the University of Pennsylvania Topics in Pharmacogenomics course since 2010 and one of her favorite PGx memories is teaching on the Stanford South Africa course.

Ingrid joined PharmGKB as a Scientific Curator in 2022. She previously was a senior biocurator for the EcoCyc model-organism database and the PI of the BsubCyc MOD at SRI International. Before she discovered biocuration, she was a Senior Scientist at Clontech, where she led the design of probes for human, mouse and rat microarrays. She holds an MS in Microbiology from the University of Georgia, a PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford University, and did postdoctoral work at the Stanford Human Genome Center.

Mark is the co-technical lead at PharmGKB and has been with PharmGKB since 2001. He received his BSE in computer science from Princeton University. Prior to working on the PharmGKB project, Mark worked for Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications.

Ryan is a software developer in the Department of Biomedical Data Science and a co-technical lead of the PharmGKB. He is a Java developer with a background in database administration and project management and has been with the PharmGKB since 2007. Ryan received his BS in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Iowa and then went on to become the database administrator and senior software developer for the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

Tiffany coordinates the activities for the PharmGKB co-PIs and is responsible for communications involving consortia, data licensing, and content use. She has a BA from the University of California at San Diego.

Clarissa coordinates the application for FDA Recognition for the PharmGKB’s database of clinical annotations, as well as other writing and editing projects. She has worked on and off with the PharmGKB since 2015 and received her BA in English from Harvard College. Prior to returning to the PharmGKB, Clarissa worked in veterinary medicine and wildlife rehabilitation.

Dr. Wright is Director of Stanford ClinGen and is a Senior Research Engineer in the Department of Biomedical Data Science. Matt works on the development of PGx Community Curation interfaces for PharmGKB, among other things. Matt received his PhD in Neuroscience from University College London, and a BSc in Anatomy/Physiology from the University of Bristol. His postdoctoral work has included many biocuration projects, including the HGNC, RefSeq (NCBI, Bethesda, MD), and since 2015 the Stanford ClinGen project. His current research focuses on building the infrastructure to support the efforts of the ClinGen (Clinical Genome Resource) consortium to collect and archive information about clinically relevant genes and genomic variants for use in precision medicine.