Deborah A. Nickerson (1954 –2021)
- Aravinda Chakravarti1,2,
- Evan E. Eichler3,4,
- Richard A. Gibbs5,6,
- Eric D. Green7,
- Richard M. Myers8 and
- Hillary E. Sussman9
- 1Center for Human Genetics and Genomics, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY;
- 2Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, New York University Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY
- 3Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA;
- 4Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- 5Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX;
- 6Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX
- 7National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
- 8HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, AL
- 9Genome Research, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Debbie Nickerson and Andrew Clark in November 1998 at the Banbury Meeting, “Large-scale Discovery and Genetic Applications of SNPs,” organized by Aravinda Chakravarti and Eric Lander (Image courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives).
In what was already a difficult year, 2021 ended on a somber note with the untimely death of Debbie Nickerson, a highly accomplished genomics researcher, a role model professional, and a long-time friend of Genome Research.
Debbie Nickerson passed away at her home, surrounded by her family, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2021. She was 67 years old and just days away from celebrating her 68th birthday. Her passing came as a shock to all who knew and loved her. As reactions to her death filled email inboxes and social media outlets, it became evident that the world had unexpectedly lost a true genomics icon.
Debbie was born in Mineola, New York, to Josephine and William Nickerson and as an adult expressed enduring pride for her New York roots. After earning her PhD from the University of Tennessee in 1978 and joining the faculty at the University of South Florida, she joined the laboratory of Leroy Hood at Caltech in 1989 and quickly grew fascinated with genomic technologies (Charmley et al. 1994). In 1992, she moved to Seattle to become a faculty member at the University of Washington in the Department of Molecular Biology and, in 2001, a founding member of the Department of Genome Sciences.
Debbie rapidly found her …
