Dr. Cruchaga is a human genomicist with expertise in multi-omics, informatics, and neurodegeneration. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2005 at University of Navarra (Spain). During his first postdoc with Dr. Pastor he conducted human genetics studies focused on Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson disease (PD). He then moved to Dr. Goate Lab to complete his training in quantitative human genomics. Dr. Cruchaga established his laboratory at Washington University in 2011, studying the genetic architecture of neurodegenerative diseases. His interests are focused in using human genomic and other omic data (transcriptomics, proteomic, metabolomics, lipidomics) to identify and understand the biological process that lead to AD, PD, frontotemporal dementia and other neurodegenerative processes. His laboratory has pioneered the use of next-generation sequencing technology to identify novel functional variants implicated on AD and PD. Additionally, his lab has been using RNA-seq data from human brain tissue and network analyses in order to identify novel pathways and pathogenic implicated on neurodegenerative diseases. In 2019, he became the scientific director of the McDonnell Genome Institute (MGI) at Washington University and funding director of the NeuroGenomics and Informatics center.