Alex H. Wagner, PhD (Director)

Nationwide Children's Hospital, The Ohio State University

Dr. Wagner is an Assistant Professor at the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine (IGM) at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Department of Pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. At IGM, he leads the development of tools and standards for advancing precision medicine and our knowledge of genomic alterations in cancers. Dr. Wagner serves as co-director for the VICC as well as co-leader of the Variant Representation group of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. He is a lead developer of the GA4GH Variation Representation Specification (VRS), a computational framework for precisely representing and sharing variation across systems. He is also an active member of the ClinGen Somatic Working Group.

In his postdoctoral work at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Wagner co-developed several precision medicine web tools, including the popular Drug-Gene Interaction Database, the database of Clinical Interpretations of Variants in Cancer (CIViC), and the VICC meta-knowledgebase.

In collaboration with his colleagues at the Siteman Cancer Center, Dr. Wagner also led the integrative analysis of tumor sequencing data from a relapsed small cell lung cancer cohort. His work demonstrated WNT signaling activation as a recurrent mechanism of acquired chemoresistance in this aggressive tumor type.

Dr. Wagner had authored over 23 peer-reviewed publications with >1,300 citations. He has also held several NIH grants as PI, including both an F32 NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the NCI and a K99/R00 Career Transition Award from the NHGRI. Dr. Wagner is a strong advocate for open science and the free exchange of biomedical knowledge.