by George Stamatis

Ralph I. Horwitz, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine, vice president for medical affairs at Case Western Reserve University, and director of the Case Research Institute, and Fred Rothstein, M.D., president and chief executive officer of University Hospitals of Cleveland, have announced the appointment of Joseph Nadeau, Ph.D., as chairman of the Department of Genetics.

Joseph Nadeau

Nadeau is an acknowledged expert in the field of genetics, particularly mouse genetics for the study of human diseases. He has an outstanding record of funding and publications, including contributions to the Human Genome Project.

"Without a doubt, we are fortunate to have someone of Joe's caliber leading the department," Horwitz said. "He is an outstanding researcher and well-respected among his colleagues here and around the world."

"Joe understands the importance of translational genetics and is very supportive of the clinical work at the Center for Human Genetics at University Hospitals," Rothstein added. "We believe that his leadership will serve to strengthen a program that is dedicated to taking discoveries from the bench to the bedside, as we recently saw with the first phase trial of a potential gene therapy for cystic fibrosis developed and tested here at UHC and CWRU."

Nadeau has co-directed the department of genetics with faculty colleagues Patricia Hunt, Ph.D., and Terry Hassold, Ph.D., since 2001. He has served on the CWRU faculty since 1996. He holds the James H. Jewell, M.D., Med '34 Professorship of Genetics and co-directs the Center for Computational Genomics, a joint center of the medical and engineering schools.

His research investigates diseases, such as high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer, which have multiple gene involvement. His work on comparative genomics, which compares the genes of one species with another, recognized that the organization of the genetic material in the mouse was similar to that of the human. This work, cited as one of the major achievements in the history of mouse genetics, opened the door to widespread use of the mouse as a model for human genetic disease.

Concerning his plans for the genetics department, Nadeau said, "With the support of the leadership of the School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland, we intend to establish the department of genetics as one of the premiere genetics research and training programs internationally. Based on our existing strengths, from basic genetics research in various organisms to the clinical genetics of humans, we will develop programs in human genetics and animal models of human diseases, computational biology and genomics.

"To accomplish this goal, we must recruit new faculty members and enhance our computational genomics and genetic engineering infrastructures," he continued. "We also plan to work closely with other faculty and programs in other departments across the University to build interdisciplinary research and training programs that tackle important but hard research problems such as the common diseases.

"A key mission will be to understand the genetic and biological basis for certain common human disease, such as cancers, infection and immunity and metabolic disorders including obesity and diabetes," Nadeau added. "By working with clinicians, basic researchers, systems biologists and engineers, we will develop a unique, cutting-edge research program that integrates information gathering with novel MEMS and nano-technologies to studies of biological systems in cells and intact organisms with genetic variants or environmental perturbations and ultimately to studies of complex systems to understand their functionality in health and disease. In this way, we will identify novel ways to treat, manage or perhaps even prevent disease."

Nadeau received his doctorate in population biology from Boston University in 1978. He held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. In 1981, Nadeau joined the faculty at the Jackson Laboratory and remained there until 1994. He then became professor in the department of human genetics at McGill University and medical scientist in the division of experimental medicine and division of clinical immunology and allergy, department of medicine, at Montreal General Hospital, until he joined CWRU and UHC.

He is a founding member of the International Mammalian Genome Society and a founding editor of the research journal Mammalian Genome. He was founder and director of the Mouse Genome Informatics Project and founder and first director of the Mouse Gene Expression Database Project.

He has served on review panels and advisory groups at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Human Genome Database. He is currently a member of the SmithKline Beecham Bioinformatics Advisory Board and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research.

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