Dr. Kardia received her master's degree in statistics and her doctoral degree in human genetics from the University of Michigan. She was then a post-doctoral fellow studying systems biology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. She joined the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 1998. Dr. Kardia's main research interests are in the genetic epidemiology of common chronic diseases and their risk factors. She is particularly interested in gene-environment and gene-gene interactions and in developing novel analytical strategies to understand the complex relationship between genetic variation, environmental variation, and risk of common chronic diseases. Her research utilizes genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic measures on large epidemiological cohorts.