Talin Haritunians, PhD, joined the McGovern Laboratory/Translational Genomics Group in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Institute (IBDI) at Cedars-Sinai in 2013. She received her PhD in Human Genetics from UCLA in 2004 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Cedars-Sinai Division of Hematology/Oncology and a research scientist at the Medical Genetics Institute prior to joining IBDI. Dr. Haritunians is primarily focused on investigating the genetics of IBD severity and susceptibility, as well as disease-specific clinical sub-phenotypes to better understand disease heterogeneity, natural history, and response to therapies. She has extensive expertise in data generation, development of quality control pipelines, and statistical analyses of large-scale genetic datasets. She has led analytic projects investigating the genetics of severe ulcerative colitis, perianal Crohn’s disease, and non-response to therapies. Recent analytic projects include genetic association studies examining sex-specific differences in risk contribution to IBD and investigating the ancestral origin of genetic risk variants in admixed minority IBD cohorts. Dr. Haritunians has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in high impact journals. She is a member of the steering committee for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases IBD Genetics Consortium, co-chairs the Consortium's analytic committee, and is an active member of the International IBD Genetics Consortium.