I didn’t start my career intending to focus on personalized medicine. For many years I was a yeast geneticist, first at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and finally at Princeton. I studied numerous topics – how cells respond to their environment, how their genes are regulated – but all within the purview of basic research in model organisms. That changed about four years ago, when the vice dean for research at Penn State Hershey asked if I wanted to come out and start an institute for personalized medicine. It was too good to pass up – a wonderful challenge and an opportunity to take everything I had learned about genomics in model organisms and apply it to people.

Penn State Hershey Institute for Personalized Medicine Established: 2013. Located: Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA. Website: www2.med.psu.edu/ipm The Institute for Personalized Medicine features a biorepository that stores blood and tissue samples along with a database of patient information, and a genome sciences core that handles nucleic acid analyses from quality assessment to next-generation sequencing. The IPM’s ongoing projects include investigations into ALS, autism, diverticulitis, epilepsy, aneurysms, Parkinson’s disease, osteoporosis and cancer – and researchers anticipate projects examining psychiatric disorders, bone healing and age-related macular degeneration. The institute includes one pathologist, three CLIA lab staff members, four consenters, seven genomics core members, 10 bioinformaticians, and approximately 12 students and 25 clinicians conducting IPM-based research projects.