Catherine Ball, Ph.D.

Vice President, Genomics and Bioinformatics, Ancestry.com

211 - Where Technology Is Going

As Vice President, Genomics and Bioinformatics at Ancestry.com, Cathy Ball leads a group of Population Geneticists, Statisticians, and Computer Scientists to create the analytical approaches behind the AncestryDNA direct-to-consumer genotyping services.

Cathy is a genomic scientist who has annotated and mined the genomes of various organisms and created resources to help other scientists exploit and explore genome data. She has collaborated on the annotation of the first eukaryotic genome (brewer's yeast) and has collaboratively built databases to explore the genomes of yeast, E. coli and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. As a pioneer in data analysis resources for high-throughput biomedical technologies, she led the Stanford Microarray Database, the largest academic database of its kind. Cathy has used high-throughput biomedical data to shed light on diverse research topics, from the biology of infectious organisms to the mechanisms involved in cell division and cancer. She received a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley prior to her research in the Departments of Genetics and Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.