Dr Murray Brilliant

Dr Murray Brilliant, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist with 30 years of experience in genetic research with a specialty in vision disorders, including albinism, age-related and complex trait genetics. He holds the James Weber Endowed Chair at the Marshfield Clinic, where he is the Director of the Center for Human Genetics and the Personalized Medicine Research Project (PMRP). PMRP consists of 20,000+ individuals with long-term (30-year average) nearly complete electronic health records combined with a biobank of DNA, plasma and serum samples.

He is also the Director of the Translational Technologies and Research Core at the Marshfield Clinic of the CTSA-Funded University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.  His role with the Institute is to administer and foster collaborative use of the PMRP and the Core Laboratory of the Marshfield Clinic. 

He is also the lead geneticist and Executive Director of the Wisconsin Genome Initiative, a collaboration in translational research, between the Marshfield Clinic, UW-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr Brilliant participates in several large National and International Consortia that utilize the PMRP resource, including NEIGHBORHOOD (Glaucoma), AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration) and eMERGE (Electronic Medical Records and Genomics).  He is the Marshfield Clinic PI for an eMERGE2 grant that aims to combine genetic information into the electronic health record to support personalized medicine and improved patient care focusing on eye disorders, as well as a supplement to that grant that aims to genotype patients for variants associated with adverse drug events before they are prescribed these drugs.  These studies operate within large consortia, utilize large data sets and make the data available to the consortia and to the research community through dbGAP and other databases.