Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)

Data, technology and populations for genomewide association studies

Itsik Pe'er, PhD
Department of Computer Science
Columbia University

October 2, 2006, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

The pervasive effect of genetic variation on medically important phenotypes provides a means for dissecting their underlying mechanisms by identifying variants that are associated with traits of interest. Current trends in human genetics now facilitate, for the first time, pursuing this potential by execution of large scale studies that scan the entire genome for potentially associated variants. Specifically, the talk will present (1) The International HapMap Project, a data resource we participated in developing to enable genomewide association studies, and what our analyses of these data tell us about human variation. (2) The current generation of SNP array technology, and how computation and statistics improvements allow it to cover the majority of common human variants. (3) The tale of a pilot association scan in an isolated population in Micronesia, where we show such scans are more promising than elsewhere, though we expose practical complexities of real data and the computational challenges they present.

About the Speaker

Itsik received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, under the mentorship of Ron Shamir. Itsik then cross trained in genetics, as a postdoctoral fellow with Jacqui Beckmann in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute, and with Mark Daly and David Altshuler at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. Itsik recently joined the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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