Lisa Borsuk (Fed)

Lisa Borsuk received her Master of Science at Iowa State University in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in 2007. After graduation, she worked for a small startup biotech company conducting sequencing and sequence analysis. She started at NIST in August 2015 in the Applied Genetics Group, working on sequence analysis of short tandem repeats (STR).

Projects and Activities

• Development of a new STRBase website with a database backend.
  • The STRBase website was deployed in 1997 to localize information about STRs, which are used by the forensic community for human identification. The site grew over the years, adding content, including information on population data, STR kits, and technology information. In 2017, a group of website developers and scientists began to go through the site, working on the reorganization of the site. The new site that was developed was deployed in April of 2023. Development of this site continues to this day.
• Development and population of the STRSeq BioProject at NCBI
  • STRSeq is a repository for STR alleles associated with commercially available forensic sequencing kits. STRSeq is the result of a collaboration with NIST and NCBI to develop the BioProject structure and GenBank records that include forensically relevant information for the human identification community. The STRAND working group, which includes members from NIST, KCL, UNT, USC, and GMI, provided the foundational data sets that were used to populate the BioProject. STRSeq continues to expand, adding new alleles to the BioProject.
• Data analysis, formatting, and visualization of biological data for the Applied Genetics Group

2024 - Bronze Medal Award 
For the modernization of the Short Tandem Repeat DNA Internet Database, a key data resource for human identity DNA testing practitioners worldwide.

2021 - Judson C. French Award 
For the development and characterization of a next-generation forensic DNA Standard Reference Material using a diverse suite of molecular techniques.