Alumni
This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.
The term “pleiotropy” describes the phenomenon of a single genetic variant influencing multiple traits of an organism. The overarching aim of my PhD is to identify such variants in order to gain a better understanding of disease biology. Studying the shared genetics of common disorders holds the potential to refine their medical classification and clinical management.
Some of the key questions I am interest in are:
- To what extent does genetics explain the epidemiologic overlap of complex traits?
- Which loci in the genome govern the co-occurrence of disorders?
- What statistical models are best suited to tease out pleiotropic variants from large-scale genetic data?
To find answers to these questions I use both summary and individual level data from genome-wide association studies of different traits and disorders. As my PhD progresses I am also keen to think about designing new approaches to detect pleiotropic regions.
Although my current work is entirely computational, I started out as a “wet-lab” scientist. During and after my undergraduate degree I worked on a broad range of topics, including psychiatric epigenetics, B cell class-switching and microRNAs in the developing immune system.