Lindsay Farrer
Principal Investigator, FHS-BAP Co-leader Admin Core and Project 1
Dr. Farrer received his PhD in Medical Genetics from Indiana University School of Medicine, completed postdoctoral training at Yale University, and is a Founding Fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics. He has made numerous discoveries about the genetic basis of Alzheimer disease (AD), age-related macular degeneration and substance use disorders. Dr. Farrer is the PI of several currently funded NIH-funded AD projects in addition to the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program (FHS-BAP) including ones focused on RNA-sequencing, other omic, and functional studies in brain tissue from African Americans; whole genome sequencing of 4,000 Koreans; mechanisms underlying the protective effect of APOE ε2 using genetic association and experimental approaches in brain tissue and neuronal cell lines. In addition, he is one of the PIs for the Collaboration on Alzheimer Disease Research (CADRE) which is analyzing data generated by the national Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP). He is a co-leader of and co-direct analyses for the Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC), which has identified most of the established AD GWAS genes, and the Leader of the BU Alzheimer Disease Research Center’s Genetics and Molecular Profiling Core. His laboratory contributed to the cloning of the presenilin and nicastrin genes, discovery of many AD genes by GWAS, and elucidation of the genetic architecture of AD in multiple ethnic populations. His research team established intracellular trafficking as one of the major pathways leading to AD and identified rare African American-specific AD-associated missense mutations in AKAP9 that increase phosphorylation of Tau protein.