Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson is a molecular medical geneticist who conducts genetic and functional analyses downstream of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for various human traits, including cancer, immune and infectious diseases. She is chief of the Laboratory of Translational Genomics (LTG) at the National Cancer Institute.

Education

Prokunina-Olsson attended Novosibirsk State University from 1986 to 1989. She then went on to earn her M. Sc. in molecular genetics at Moscow State University in Russia from 1989 to 1994. From there, she continued her education at Uppsala University Faculty of Medicine in Sweden, where she received her Ph.D. in 2004 in human medical genetics. Marta Alarcon-Riquelme was her doctoral advisor and Juha Kere was an opponent of her dissertation.

Career Prokunina-Olsson began her career working as a research associate from 1992 to 1994 with the National Center for Medical Genetics in Moscow in the DNA diagnostics laboratory. She then began working as a visiting scientist at the Karolinska Institute between December 1994 and August 1998 where she completed research regarding the physical mapping of tumor suppressor genes. In 2008 she began working as a research fellow in the Laboratory of Translational Genomics of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, shortly after, in 2010 Prokunina-Olsson became a full-time investigator with this laboratory. In 2014 she then became a senior investigator. Then, in February 2018 she became the acting director of the laboratory of translational genomics before being promoted to director in December.

Research interests At NIH, Prokunina-Olsson is most interested in researching how variations in genes discovered by recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are correlated to cancer. “IFNL4-ΔG Allele Is Associated with an Interferon Signature in Tumors and Survival of African-American Men with Prostate Cancer” published in Clinical Cancer Research “Association of germline variants in the APOBEC3 region with cancer risk and enrichment with APOBEC-signature mutations in tumors” published in Nature Genetics “Comparison of Functional Variants in IFNL4 and IFNL3 for Association with Hepatitis C Virus Clearance” published in the Journal of Hepatology “Expression of Interferon Lambda 4 Is Associated with Reduced Proliferation and Increased Cell Death in Human Hepatic Cells” published in the Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research.

Honors and awards

Mentorship Award (2022) NCI Director's Merit Award (2013) Seventh Annual Young Investigators (2013) Issued by Genome Technology Magazine. NCI Director Innovation Award (2009, 2012, 2014) For her contributions in cancer research. This was issued by the National Cancer Institute.