Dr. Vance is professor and chair of the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics and holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He is the Director of the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Miami Institute for Human Genomics (MIHG). Dr. Vance received his PhD in Medical Genetics from Indiana University and his MD from Duke University. A board-certified neurologist and board-certified PhD Medical Geneticist, he has over 200 publications. He is the principal investigator of the University of Miami Morris K. Udall Parkinson Disease Research Center of Excellence. His primary area of research is the genetics of neurodegenerative disease and he has a particular interest in identifying susceptibility genes for common disorders including Parkinson disease, Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, Alzheimer disease, autism, and cardiovascular disease. Recently, he has been focusing efforts on the development of the genomic medicine model; he is a co-PI and a major contributor to the Department of Defense funded Genomedical Connection that is ongoing in Greensboro, North Carolina.