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Scientific Review Officer and Executive Director, CIDR

Scientific Review Branch

Education

B.S., The Pennsylvania State University, 1982

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1989

Biography

Dr. Barbara Thomas is the Scientific Review Officer and Executive Director of the NIH Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR), a trans-NIH program that provides access to high throughput genotyping and next-generation sequencing services to NIH funded investigators through a contract with Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Thomas is involved with all aspects of the program, including peer review of grant applications, policy and decision making through the CIDR Board of Governors, high-level oversight of project management, and data sharing through the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).

Dr. Thomas also is involved with several data sharing initiatives at NHGRI. She is co-chair of the NHGRI Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) Governance Committee, where she is involved in policy interpretation, facilitation, and implementation of NIH-wide GDS policies and NHGRI-specific priorities. She also chairs the NHGRI Data Access Committee (DAC), which evaluates data access requests for NHGRI datasets in dbGaP.

Dr. Thomas received a B.S. degree in Microbiology from the Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics and Development from Columbia University. She received postdoctoral training at UCLA and was a tenure track investigator in the NCI intramural research program, where she studied the control of cell cycle progression during development in the fruit fly D. melanogaster. In 2006 Dr. Thomas joined the NIH Center for Scientific Review, where she was the Scientific Review Officer for the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology study section. Dr. Thomas joined the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2016.

  • Biography

    Dr. Barbara Thomas is the Scientific Review Officer and Executive Director of the NIH Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR), a trans-NIH program that provides access to high throughput genotyping and next-generation sequencing services to NIH funded investigators through a contract with Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Thomas is involved with all aspects of the program, including peer review of grant applications, policy and decision making through the CIDR Board of Governors, high-level oversight of project management, and data sharing through the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).

    Dr. Thomas also is involved with several data sharing initiatives at NHGRI. She is co-chair of the NHGRI Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) Governance Committee, where she is involved in policy interpretation, facilitation, and implementation of NIH-wide GDS policies and NHGRI-specific priorities. She also chairs the NHGRI Data Access Committee (DAC), which evaluates data access requests for NHGRI datasets in dbGaP.

    Dr. Thomas received a B.S. degree in Microbiology from the Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics and Development from Columbia University. She received postdoctoral training at UCLA and was a tenure track investigator in the NCI intramural research program, where she studied the control of cell cycle progression during development in the fruit fly D. melanogaster. In 2006 Dr. Thomas joined the NIH Center for Scientific Review, where she was the Scientific Review Officer for the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology study section. Dr. Thomas joined the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2016.

Last updated: September 23, 2019