Jaana Hartiala, PhD

Biography

Jaana A. Hartiala, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Preventive Medicine in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. She earned her doctorate in Molecular Epidemiology from the University of Southern California. Dr. Hartiala received her post-doctoral training in Applied Statistical Genetics at the USC Keck School of Medicine, where she studied genome-wide associations of metabolite levels and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Hartiala's research interests include systems genetics and computational biology approaches to identify genes and pathways for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases; identification of environmental exposures that modulate susceptibility to cardiopulmonary diseases using epidemiological approaches; and study genome-wide gene-environment interactions for disease outcome and associated biomarkers. Dr. Hartiala's more recent work include identifying a sex-specific genetic variant in the CPS1 gene that raises glycine levels and protects against cardiovascular disease among women. In another project, she showed that ambient air pollution is associated with the severity of coronary atherosclerosis and incident myocardial infarction among cardiac patients. Her current projects involve integrating large scale genetic, gene expression and metabolomic data to understand susceptibility to atherosclerosis and asthma.