Nancy Cox, PhD, a quantitative human geneticist at Vanderbilt Univeristy, presented a talk is titled “Integrating omics and biobank data for new kinds of discovery and translation” for a HudsonAlpha Research Seminar on November 15.
Dr. Cox is a quantitative human geneticist with a long-standing research program in identifying and characterizing the genetic component to common human diseases. Her research program is currently focused on developing approaches for integrating information on genome variation with genome function and in the applications of those approaches to data from Vanderbilt’s biobank (BioVU), the largest university biobank in the world, with more than 240,000 DNA samples linked to a high quality electronic health record going back more than 20 years. Investigations across a biobank, rather than with individual disease datasets, allow new kinds of questions to be asked — not just “what is the genetic component to this disease?” but “what does this gene have to do with human disease?” Being able to see results for not just one disease, but for the entire medical phenome and also for quantitative biomarkers can change how we think of disease and how we consider the options for translation of discoveries we make.
Howard Jacob, PhD, hosted the Wednesday seminar. The next seminar will be Wednesday, November 29, featuring Natalie Rasgon, MD, PhD. Dr. Rasgon is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine where she is also the director of the Stanford Center for Neuroscience in Women’s Health.
More information on HudsonAlpha Research Seminars, including an upcoming schedule, can be found at hudsonalpha.org/seminars.
