Kerstin Lindblad-Toh is a professor in comparative genomics at Uppsala University and the scientific director of vertebrate genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Lindblad-Toh received her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, in 1998 studying trinucleotide repeat disorders. While a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now the Broad Institute, Lindblad-Toh worked on several projects, including mouse SNP discovery, the development of genotyping technologies, and association studies in human disease.

Lindblad-Toh’s research emphasizes the dog as a comparative model for human diseases and cancer. Her group has mapped over 20 diseases including cancer and autoimmune, cardiac, and neurological diseases. Many of the findings are now being translated to human patients cohorts.

She has also led the sequencing and analysis of >20 vertebrate species including the mouse, dog, monodelphis, anolis lizard and more recently the Zoonomia project (240 mammals), published in 11 papers in Science in April 2023. This research aims to understand the function and evolution of mammalian genomes and to identify functional disease associated variants and tumor mutations in human disease.

An author on over 240 papers, Lindblad-Toh has received several scholarships and awards. In 2012, she was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2020 she was elected into the US National Academy of Sciences.