Background

Dr. Hanson’s research group studies the genetic and environmental influences on health throughout the life course. Her specific areas of research include understanding how environmental influences in utero and early childhood affect later life health, the relationship between fertility and later life health, genetic determinants of longevity, familial predisposition to obesity and the interaction with social and physical environments, and familial, community, and socioeconomic factors affecting health outcomes. Dr. Hanson is a faculty member in the Department of Surgery. She also serves as the Assistant Director of Research at the Utah Population Database (UPDB), the co-director of the Surgical Population Analytic Research Core (SPARC), and the co-lead of national Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Early Life Exposures Working Group. She is currently developing a tool for identifying familial multi-phenotype clusters that will aid researchers in identifying patterns of disease co-aggregation within families. This tool will be part of the larger Kinship Analysis Toolkit (KAT) that has been developed to assist researchers using the Utah Population Database (UPDB) to study genetic and environmental determinants of health. She is also working with Dr. Orly Alter on her NCI Physical Sciences in Oncology U01 project, which uses multi-tensor decompositions to identify new genomic profiles that have the potential to improve the treatment and survival of cancer patients.