PI PROFILE 
Amanda Ewart Toland, PhD, FACMG (Mandy), is Professor and Interim Chair in the Department of Cancer Biology Genetics with a joint appointment in the Division of Human Genetics, Department of Internal Medicine at the Ohio State University (OSU). She is also co-Director of the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center Genomics Shared Resource [GSR]. Dr. Toland received her PhD in Human Genetics from the University of Utah in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Keating where she identified the genetic cause of Williams syndrome. She completed clinical training in PhD Medical Genetics at the University of California San Francisco followed by a research postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Allan Balmain before joining the faculty at OSU in 2005. Dr. Toland currently coordinates the KeraCon Immunosuppression Working Group, is a steering committee member of the ENIGMA consortium and a member of the CIMBA consortium. Related to her work with ENIGMA, she is on the ClinVar Variant Expert Curation Panel for BRCA1/BRCA2 and is a member of the BRCA Exchange Steering Committee. She is a member of the NCI PDQ Cancer Genetics Editorial Board and is a member (and future chair 2023-25) of the NIH Cancer, Heart, and Sleep Epidemiology Panel B study section. Since 2017, she has been the Associate Editor for Translational Sciences for the British Journal of Dermatology. Dr. Toland is faculty advisor for OSU Camp Kesem, a college-student run group that provides free summer camps to kids whose parents had/have a diagnosis of cancer. Although having lived in Ohio for over 15 years, Dr. Toland considers herself a “Westerner” having grown up in Washington State and completing her PhD and postdoctoral training in Utah and California respectively. Outside of the laboratory, Dr. Toland enjoys baking, hiking in Metro parks, gardening, reading, and spending time with her husband and two kids.
Summary of Research:
Dr. Toland’s laboratory studies the role of genetic variants in modifying disease risk of hereditary and sporadic cancers using a variety of in vitro, in vivo and population-based approaches. Current projects focus on the impact of germline variants on somatic mutations in breast and colon cancer, classification of variants of uncertain clinical significance in hereditary breast cancer genes, the use of polygenic risk scores in risk decision making in BRCA mutation carriers, understanding the role of OCA2 and OCA2 variants in skin cancer risk, and the identification and characterization of driver mutations in metastatic cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas. She is an author on over 180 peer-reviewed publications (NCBI My Bibliography Page).
Featured publications: Amanda Toland’s Bibliography