Subject: Applications of Set-Valued Models in Disease Gene Mapping

Lecturer: Guolian Kang, Associate Member

      Department of Biostatistics, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Abstract: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been successful in the last decades to identify common variants (CVs) associated with common or rare diseases. With availability of next generation sequencing (NGS) data, it becomes possible to identify rare variants (RVs) associated with common or rare diseases too in the last several years. Commonly used statistical methods for the identification of CVs do not work well to identify RVs. The set-valued (SV) system widely exists. The corresponding set-valued system identification was investigated and used successfully in various field such as sensor system, sensor networks, telecommunications, etc. In this talk, I will present how to apply SV idea to the frontline research of causal gene mapping in GWAS and NGS. I will first discuss the application of SV idea to the primary binary outcome in a case-control design, followed by primary ordinal outcomes. Then the generalization of these results to the secondary binary and continuous phenotype analysis in a case-control design will be presented, followed by secondary phenotype analyses in an extreme phenotype sequencing design. Real large-scale GWAS or NGS data will also be analyzed for each topic above to show the performance of the new proposed SV methods compared to its alternatives. At last, the future interesting ongoing research topics will be discussed.

Time: 10:00am.-11:00am.,July 15

Location：213 Meeting Room, School of Statistics

About the Lecturer：Dr. Kang is currently an Associate Member (=Associate Professor) in Department of Biostatistics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Her research interests include statistical genetics, system biology, clinical trial design, and genetical epidemiology. She has published more than 80 scientific papers in top-tier journals such Nature Genetics, Journal of Clinical Oncology, The New England Journal of Medicine, etc, which have been cited independently for more than 1,000 times. Several of her methodology research works have been featured by international media such as NewsRX.com (USA), Science Daily (USA)，International Adaptogens (Venezuela)，Nature Review Genetics (UK), and 《Transgénicos》 (Cuba). Dr. Kang is PI of a Data Coordinating Center funded by NHLBI and lead biostatistician for 9 NCI/NIH funded grants. She has designed more than 50 clinical trial protocols. She is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Genetics and ad hoc reviewers for more than 30 international journals and for NIH(USA) and DPFS(UK) grant proposals.