Events for July 14, 2023 - March 24, 2023

TITLE: "AutoComplete: Deep Learning-based Phenotype Imputation" ABSTRACT: Health data has become increasingly available, vast in scale, and highly missing. For many downstream applications, the ability to accurately impute missing features in health records may tap into additional analytical power which would be unrealized otherwise. While existing imputation methods are applicable, many fall short in one […]

“Regulating Insurer Use of Genetic Information” Hosted by Christina Palmer

TITLE: "A pan-cancer multi-omic analysis of tumor proliferation." ABSTRACT: The underlying mechanisms of dysregulated cellular proliferation in cancer remain unclear; however, it is hypothesized that specific mutations, mutational signatures, evolutionary trajectories and other global (epi)genomic features may be linked to differing rates of proliferation. In this presentation, I will showcase a landscape analysis of cellular proliferation […]

TITLE: "Ecological Stability Emerges at the Level of Strains in the Human Gut Microbiome." ABSTRACT: The human gut microbiome is a complex community that harbors substantial ecological diversity at the species level, as well as at the strain level within species. In healthy hosts, species abundance fluctuations in the microbiome community are thought to be […]

“Population genetics in an era of genomic health” Hosted by Christa Caggiano

TITLE: "Differences in the Signatures of Selection Between the Autosomes and the X Chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster." ABSTRACT: Sex chromosomes in Drosophila are found in a hemizygous state in males. Thus, deleterious mutations may be purged more rapidly on the X chromosome than on the autosomes. This purging can result in less available standing variation that can seed […]

TITLE: "Decoding alarm signal propagation of seed-harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex californicus." ABSTRACT: Alarm signal propagation through social-insect colonies provides an empirically tractable context for analyzing information flow through a natural system, with useful insights for network dynamics in other social groups, including human social networks. Here, I develop a methodological approach to track alarm spread within […]

“Towards Bayesian phylogenetics via systematic search and gradient ascent” Hosted by Sriram Sankararaman

TITLE: "Restricted diet drives autism gut-microbiome associations, and other tales from the Australian Autism Biobank" ABSTRACT: The Australian Autism Biobank (AAB) is an initiative of the Autism CRC – the first national, cooperative research effort focused on autism across the lifespan. The AAB recruited a total of ~2,500 autistic children, family members, and unrelated undiagnosed […]

TITLE: "Asymmetric Branching Scale Factors as Features in Neuronal Cell-Type Classification" ABSTRACT: Neurons are connected by complex branching processes - axons and dendrites - that process information for organisms to respond to their environment. Classifying neurons according to differences in structure or function is a fundamental piece of neuroscience. In previous work, we constructed a […]