Elaine A. Ostrander is a senior investigator and Chief of the Cancer Genetics Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health. She received her Ph.D. from the Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981. She then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she began the canine genome project, and also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the Human Genome Project. She joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 1993, where she became a member (professor) and head of the Genetics Program. She moved in 2004 to NIH, where her research interests continue to be in the areas of human cancer genetics and development of the canine system for mapping complex traits. Her household includes a border collie named Tess.