Barbara Trask, M.S., Ph.D.
Director, Human Biology

Dr. Barbara Trask is head of the Human Biology division.

Barbara J. Trask, Ph.D., is the Director of the Division of Human Biology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, and Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

She received a B.S. in Biological Sciences and M.S. in Wildlife Ecology from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and an M.S. degree in Biology and Ph.D. in Medicine from Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. She spent seven years as a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California, before joining the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington School of Medicine as a Research Professor in 1992.

She became a Professor of Molecular Biotechnology in 1997, served as Vice Chair of the department during 1998-1999 and Acting Chair in 2000, and became the Director of the Division of Human Biology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2000.

Dr. Trask has served on a variety of national advisory committees, including chairing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Genome Study Section from 1997-1999 and several other NIH review panels. She recently advised the NIH Center for Scientific Review on redrawing the boundaries of review panels for genetics and genomics research. She is a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) Resource Steering Panel at the NIH, and the editorial boards of Genome Research, Human Molecular Genetics, and Genes, Chromosomes and Cancer.

Dr. Trask is an expert on genome organization and a leader in developing techniques to analyze the arrangement of genes and chromosomes in cells. Her current research focuses on the organization of olfactory receptor genes, which contain instructions to make the proteins responsible for detecting odorants, and the complex, recently duplicated regions of human genome and their contribution to human biology and disease.