Douglas M. Ruderfer Ph.D.

Douglas M. Ruderfer Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Digital Genomic Medicine, Endowed Director of Digital Genomic Health and an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics and Psychiatry at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Formally trained in computer science and genetics, he received his B.S. in computer engineering and M.S. in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. in human genetics from Cardiff University. After graduating from Hopkins, he pursued his interests in applying computational approaches to biological problems at Princeton University. There, he leveraged model organisms to advance understanding of population and evolutionary genetics. Seeking to work directly on human disease, he started working on the genetics of psychiatric disease while in Boston at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital and then in New York City at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.In 2016, he was recruited to Vanderbilt University to expand his efforts on the genetics of behavioral health by incorporating clinical data from electronic health records (EHR). His research revolves around developing and applying analytical approaches to understanding the genetic etiology and improving the phenotypic characterization of behavioral health traits. More recent work has included building infrastructure to collect data from digital health devices and online surveys to capture important health related behaviors enabling opportunities for personalized health and prevention. Finally, his work aims to bridge clinical information and genetic variation into better functional and clinical understanding to ultimately improve outcomes for patients. This work is highlighted by his efforts to identify patients most likely to benefit from genetic testing using routinely collected EHR data which was selected as one of 10 key advances in applying genomic information to clinical care in 2021. In 2018, he received a Vanderbilt University Medical Center Biomedical Science Impact Award and was recognized for one of the top 10 leading research achievements among those funded by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. He was a 2021 Vanderbilt University Chancellor Faculty Fellow and winner of the Chancellor’s Award for Research in 2023.