Norma J. Nowak, Ph.D.

Director of Science and Technology
New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences

Norma Jean Nowak, Ph.D., is recognized as a leader in the field of genomics.  Her research contributed directly to the Human Genome Project, as well as to microarray-based approaches to understanding heritable disorders and cancer. In 2003, she was named director of science and technology for the New York State Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences.

A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), where she received her Ph.D. in Experimental Pathology, Dr. Nowak has spent her career contributing to the vibrancy of the Western New York life sciences industry. She previously served since 1999 as director of the Microarray and Genomics Facility, a collaborative research lab shared by Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, headquartered at RPCI. Prior to that, she was involved for 14 years in research at RPCI developing physical clone resources for cloning disease genes and mapping the human genome.

Among her major achievements, Nowak has authored landmark papers describing the cloning of several heritable cancer disorders, including a form of Ataxia Telangiectasia (Nijmegen Breakage Syndrome). Her work on the Human Genome Project was published in the genome issue of Nature. Dr. Nowak led and coordinated the three groups for the NCI extramural Cancer Chromosome Aberration Project. As part of this project, Dr. Nowak also developed BAC based array CGH (Comparative Genomic Hybridization) a microarray-based method for identifying numerical differences in DNA between tumor and normal cells and cells from individuals with genetic disorders. The results of this work were published in Nature Genetics. She also was a key member of the GENSAT project studying spatial and temporal gene expression during development of the central nervous system in mice, and this work was published in the 2003 genome edition of Nature.

Nowak, who has received more than $4 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health and various foundations, has authored or co-authored 80 research articles in leading scientific journals and has served as an associate editor of Physiological Genomics. She recently joined the editorial board of Cytogenetics and Genome Research as an Associate Editor.

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News

UB's New Medical Research Building Will Benefit Patients and the Region
2/2/2012 - BUFFALO, NY - "The stage is set for some important medical advances at the University at Buffalo's Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC)..." [Read On...]

Donation in Name of Holm Could Net UB $2M
1/23/2012 - BUFFALO, NY - "An anonymous donation from a University at Buffalo faculty member, which could eventually total as much as $1 million, is intended to establish a research fund in honor of the late UB faculty member Bruce Holm..." [Read On...] Buffalo News article.Tech Transfer Tactics article. UB News article.

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