Marylyn D Ritchie

Marylyn D Ritchie, PhD, is the Edward Rose, M.D. and Elizabeth Kirk Rose, M.D. Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She concurrently serves as Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Vice President for Research Informatics for the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, and Vice Dean of Artificial Intelligence and Computing.

Education:

• BS in Biology, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, 1999
• MS in Applied Statistics, Vanderbilt University, 2002
• PhD in Statistical Genetics, Vanderbilt University, 2004

Research Interests

Dr Ritchie’s work integrates computational genomics, bioinformatics, pharmacogenomics, and systems genomics to advance precision medicine. She develops statistical and machine-learning approaches to dissect epistasis, genetic epidemiology, and evolutionary computation in large-scale biobanks, with a special focus on cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Her group is also pioneering translational informatics methods that incorporate social determinants of health and fairness metrics into AI-driven clinical decision support.

Publication Trends

In 2025 alone, Dr Ritchie co-authored more than fifteen high-impact studies spanning vision-language models for 3D CT, multi-omics Alzheimer’s risk prediction, fairness in neuroimaging AI, ancestry-specific pharmacogenomics, and cloud-based polygenic risk score platforms. The collective work highlights a shift from single-omics discovery to integrative, equitable, and clinically actionable models across diverse ancestries.

Awards & Honors

• While specific named awards were not detailed in the text, Dr Ritchie’s endowed professorship and multi-institutional leadership roles signify sustained recognition.

Grants & Advising

Dr Ritchie leads large NIH, foundation, and industry-funded initiatives that support interdisciplinary teams of postdocs, graduate students, and data scientists. Her lab actively mentors trainees from UPenn’s Cell and Molecular Biology and Genomics and Computational Biology graduate groups.

Laboratories & Teams

She directs the Ritchie Lab (ritchielab.org), which develops open-source visualization tools such as PhenoGram, PheWAS-View, and Synthesis-View for genome-wide and phenome-wide data exploration. The lab operates within the Institute for Biomedical Informatics and collaborates closely with the Penn Medicine BioBank and multiple clinical departments to translate big-data discoveries into precision medicine workflows.