Dr. Charles Kooperberg is a biostatistician. He specializes in statistical genetics and the analysis of nuanced, complex data known as “high-dimensional” data, particularly as it is applied to understanding the genes and proteins that underlie human disease. Dr. Kooperberg and his colleagues create new statistical techniques to extract useful biological information from patient data, which is an increasingly complex process thanks to the sequencing of the human genome and recent breakthroughs in high-throughput technologies for single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, genotyping, gene expression and protein measurements. Many new genetic associations have been identified by genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, and there are potentially many uses of these identified variants. These include a better understanding of how disease develops, personalized medicine, new leads for studying underlying biology and disease-risk prediction.