TITLE:“Longitudinal phenotyping of Severe Mental Illness from Electronic Health Records.” ABSTRACT:Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offer an exciting avenue for large-scale genetic studies of psychiatric disorders in globally diverse populations. As a potential source of inexpensive and longitudinal phenotypes, they are key for the study of severe mental illness trajectories. The Clinica San Juan de Dios […]

TITLE: "Population structure inference for biobank-scale data." ABSTRACT: Inferring the structure of human populations from genetic variation data is a key task in population and medical genomic studies. While a number of methods for population structure inference have been proposed, current methods are impractical to run on biobank-scale genomic datasets containing millions of individuals and […]

Associate Professor of Genetics and of Computer Science, Yale School of Medicine “TBD” Hosted by Jason Ernst

Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania “Genome folding, unfolding, and refolding in the mammalian brain” Hosted by Hilary Coller

TITLE: "Mechanisms of robust entrainment of biological oscillators involved in gastric peristalsis.” ABSTRACT: Oscillator entrainment is a widely observed phenomenon in natural systems. Using a computational modeling approach, we decipher the essential intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms of robust entrainment of biological oscillators involved in gastric peristalsis. Specifically, we show that the constitutive intercellular IP3-facilitated pacemaker […]

TITLE: "Defining chromatin accessibility and molecular dysregulation in Down Syndrome." ABSTRACT: Despite accumulating almost two centuries of medical information, the exact mechanisms underlying Down Syndrome (DS) developmental pathology remain unknown. DS is caused by trisomy of chromosome21 (T21), but without pinpointing the way in which T21 confers molecular dysfunctions and subsequently impairs neurodevelopment, it has been […]

Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Academic Personnel, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics “Citizen Scientific Racism: White Nationalist Appropriations of Genetic Research” Hosted by Christina Palmer  

TITLE: "Advancing admixture graph estimation via maximum likelihood network orientation." ABSTRACT: Admixture, the interbreeding between previously distinct populations, is a pervasive force in evolution. The evolutionary history of populations in the presence of admixture can be modeled by augmenting phylogenetic trees with additional nodes that represent admixture events. However, these admixture graphs present formidable inferential challenges. Exhaustively evaluating all […]

TITLE: "Sources of zeros in single-cell RNA-seq data and how they affect data analysis." ABSTRACT: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies have revolutionized biomedical sciences by enabling genome-wide profiling of gene expression levels at an unprecedented single-cell resolution. A distinct characteristic of scRNA-seq data is the vast proportion of zeros unseen in bulk RNA-seq data. Researchers […]