The Potomac Institute is excited to announce Beth Russell as our newest CReST Fellow.

Dr. Beth A. Russell joined thePotomac Institute in September 2016 as a Research Associate and CReST Fellow. Her goals are to improve healthcare outcomes and to promote scientific literacy through efforts in policy, teaching, research, and outreach. She is particularly interested in the policies motivating and limiting science and technology innovation in biomedicine, data science, privacy, and security.

Prior to her appointment at CReST, Dr. Russell served as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Big Data and Analytics Fellow in the Office of the Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation from 2015-2016, and in the Office of the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health from 2014-2015.

Dr. Russell came to Washington, D.C. in 2014 from the University of Chicago where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Surgery, the Ben May Department for Cancer Research, and the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. Her research focus was on the genomic activity of steroid hormone signaling in female cancers and obesity and the impact of high-level DNA structural features on estrogen signaling.

Dr. Russell received her Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University, for innovative research in the comparative genomic impact of estrogen signaling in female cancers. Prior to that, she received a B.A. in Biology and in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.Phil. from Yale University in Genetics.