Jennifer Harris

Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway

Biography


Dr. Jennifer Harris is a Senior Researcher in the Division of Epidemiology, at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway.  She has interdisciplinary training in life-span development and genetics. Since 2000 she has been a consultant to Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute of Aging, NIH in the USA where she advises on the development of research directions that integrate genetics and genomics with a broad behavioral and social science portfolio. She has been highly active in several international biobank harmonization and research projects. She led the European Union project Promoting Harmonization of Epidemiological Biobanks in Europe (PHOEBE) and has led the Norwegian participation in the European Network of Genetic and Genomic Epidemiology (ENGAGE) and Genome-wide Analyses of European Twin Cohorts to Identify Genes in Common Diseases (GenomEUtwin). She currently leads the strategic integration work package in Biobank Standardisation and Harmonization for Research Excellence in the European Union (BioSHaRE-EU) and the ethics work package in Biobank Norway. Dr. Harris founded the population-based twin panel study at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health under her research interests to integrate developmental approaches with genetic research into complex phenotypes and she currently has several twin studies that exploit diverse molecular and quantitative methodologies. In 2013 she won the James Shields Award for outstanding research in behavioral genetics using the twin method. She has broad commitment to the wider scientific community and serves on several expert panels, scientific advisory boards, steering groups, review committees and editorial boards.