Christopher I. Amos has received the 2020 AACR-American Cancer Society Award for Research Excellence in Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention.
Amos, the Selzman Endowed Professor, director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, and associate director of Quantitative Science at Baylor College of Medicine, is being recognized for his unique blend of expertise in biostatistics and bioinformatics, genetics, and cancer epidemiology.
Amos has leveraged these skills to expand upon emerging genomic technologies, making seminal contributions to the understanding of how genetic and environmental factors can cause complex diseases such as cancer.
The 2020 AACR-American Cancer Society Award for Research Excellence in Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention was established by the AACR and the American Cancer Society in 1992 to recognize outstanding research accomplishments in the fields of cancer epidemiology, biomarkers, and prevention.
Amos helped develop novel and robust methods for the analysis of quantitative traits using variance components and strong linkage approaches for understanding the etiological basis of complex diseases such as cancer. The methods that Amos has developed are now widely applied and highly regarded, in part because they do not require genetic models to be specified.
He was the first author of a landmark paper in Nature Genetics that identified a region of robust linkage disequilibrium within 15q25 as a lung cancer susceptibility gene locus. This region encompasses the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit genes CHRNA3 and CHRNA5, which have a defined role in nicotine dependence and a hypothesized direct role in downstream signaling pathways that promote carcinogenesis.
