Christy L. Avery

Christy L. Avery is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. She serves as Program Leader for Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology. Her research focuses on genomic epidemiology, gene-environment interactions, metabolomics, and assessing cardiovascular disease burden in diverse populations across the life course.

Her work integrates longitudinal data and multi-level factors (cellular, individual, contextual) to study health risks like hypertension and hypercholesterolemia, as well as behaviors such as smoking, physical activity, and obesity. She investigates genetic diversity in health risks among multi-ethnic U.S. populations and leads studies on metabolomic correlates of health and disease.

Research Themes include:

• Genomic epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases
• Gene-environment interactions and omic biomarkers
• Multi-ethnic population studies
• Epidemiological methods for life-course analysis
• Metabolomics in disease prevention

Recent Publications highlight trends in:

• Genetic risk scores for cardiovascular disease
• Multi-ethnic genome-wide association studies (GWAS)
• Metabolomic biomarkers in lifespan health
• Pharmacogenomics and drug-gene interactions
• Environmental health and exposomics
• Statistical genetics and causal inference

She contributes to trans-ethnic genomics, refining genetic loci and improving precision medicine frameworks. Her collaborations span consortia like the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) and the Population Architecture Using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) study.