Janelia (HHMI) talk: Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits and Disease Risks via AI and Large Genomic Datasets

Janelia is the research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), located near Washington DC. It is reputed to be heaven on earth for scientists :-)

I'll be visiting there next week (see title and abstract below). If you're at Janelia and want to meet with me there is still a little space on my schedule. Or just come to the talk and try to grab me afterward.

My talk is Tuesday May 7 12:30 – 1:30.

Genomic Prediction of Complex Traits and Disease Risks via AI and Large Genomic Datasets

Abstract: The talk is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of the rapidly advancing area of genomic prediction of disease risks using polygenic scores. We can now identify risk outliers (e.g., with 5 or 10 times normal risk) for about 20 common disease conditions, ranging from diabetes to heart diseases to breast cancer, using inexpensive SNP genotypes (i.e., as offered by 23andMe). We can also predict some complex quantitative traits (e.g., adult height with accuracy of few cm, using ~20k SNPs). I discuss application of these results in precision medicine as well as embryo selection in IVF, and give some details concerning genetic architecture. The second part covers the AI/ML used to build these predictors, with an emphasis on "sparse learning" and phase transitions in high dimensional statistics.