Dr. Farnham is the William M. Keck Professor of Biochemistry and the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Farnham received her bachelor’s degree from Rice University, her Ph.D. from Yale University, and performed her post-doctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Farnham previously held Professorships at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of California-Davis where she was the Associate Director of the UC Davis Genome Center. Dr. Farnham is an international leader in the study of chromatin regulation and its control of transcription factor binding and function. Her lab was the first to develop ChIP protocols for mammalian cells and for the study of tumors from cancer patients, focusing on key cancer pathways. Dr. Farnham has been a member of the ENCODE Consortium, the NIH Roadmap Epigenome Mapping Consortium, and the PsychENCODE Consortium. As part of these consortia, her lab has been a major contributor to the production of ChIP-seq datasets in normal and tumor cells for site-specific factors, histone-modifying complexes, and modified histones, developing protocols that are widely used by the field. Based on her contributions to biomedical research, she was elected as a fellow of AAAS in 2010 and in 2012 she received the ASBMB Herbert A Sober Award, which recognizes outstanding biochemical and molecular biological research with particular emphasis on the development of methods and techniques to aid in research. As of January 2024, Dr. Farnham has a h-index of 100 on Google Scholar, with a total of 69,486 citations. Dr. Farnham is a strong supporter of the training of young scientists. To date, 30 PhD students, 14 Master’s students, 19 Postdoctoral Fellows, and 34 Undergraduates have performed research in her lab. In addition, 21 research specialists have contributed to the publications from her lab. In 2019, Dr. Farnham was the inaugural appointee as the Vice Dean for Health and Biomedical Science Education at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, overseeing more than 1300 graduate students and ~200 postdocs.
