Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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Join us for the next instalment of the STAGE International Speaker Seminar Series (ISSS) with…

Dr. Elizabeth Atkinson
Assistant Professor
Department of Molecular and Human Genetics
Baylor College of Medicine

Free Online Event | Registration Required

Talk Title
Empowering Gene Discovery and Accelerating Clinical Translation for Diverse Admixed Populations

Abstract
Genetic studies offer a promising basis for understanding pathophysiology and identifying new molecular targets for medicines. However, due to the lack of methodological approaches that can account for their genomic complexity, diverse admixed populations are systematically excluded from genetic epidemiology studies. Admixed populations, including many individuals who self-identify as African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos, make up more than a third of the US populace, yet face health disparities in part due to being so sorely underrepresented in research. To reap full and equitable benefits from existing and ongoing efforts to recruit more representative cohorts, there is a pressing unmet need for the development of tools permitting the study of complex traits in admixed peoples. Here, we present our novel statistical frameworks that facilitate the inclusion of admixed individuals in association studies by incorporating fine-scale consideration of genetic ancestry. We find that incorporating local ancestry into GWAS via our method, Tractor, confers several benefits beyond enabling the well-calibrated inclusion of admixed samples, including boosting power to discover ancestry-specific loci, improving the resolution of association signals, generating reliable ancestry- specific effect size estimates and p values, and identifying novel ancestry-specific associations missed by standard GWAS procedures. In conclusion, our efforts fill a gap in existing resources and will improve our understanding of complex diseases across diverse understudied populations.

Speaker Profile
Dr. Elizabeth Atkinson (Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine) is a population and statistical geneticist working towards increased inclusion of diverse ancestry participants in large- scale genomics analyses. My lab works towards this goal by leveraging global genomic datasets and cutting-edge computational techniques to build and apply resources for the improved statistical genetic study of diverse human populations that genomics has so far underserved. Our work is centered on complex traits with particular focus on admixed populations, though many of the tools we develop are broadly applicable across phenotypes and populations, giving them the potential for widespread impact on human health.

Sponsors
CANSSI Ontario STAGE (STAGE) is a training program in genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics, housed at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and funded by CANSSI Ontario at U of T, an extra-departmental unit in the Faculty of Arts & Science that is home to the Ontario Regional Centre of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI).

Seminars are sponsored by The Hospital for Sick Children (Genetics & Genome Biology Program), the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, and the McLaughlin Centre at the University of Toronto.