Our research group works on three synergistic areas: precision medicine, functional genomics, and microbiome data science. We develop novel methods to analyze very large scale datasets, in order to identify genes that are responsible for disease, understand the disease mechanism, and gain clinical insights.

Precision Medicine

We seek to address a few key questions in precision medicine: 1) What are the biomarkers that mediates the genetic effects on human diseases; 2) Can we find drug targets using a human genetics approach?

To address these questions, our method works focus on the analysis of biobank scale dataset and the meta-analysis of sequence based association studies. We developed a few highly popular software tools including RVTESTS and RAREMETAL. Our methodology work has led to numerous publications in leading journals such as Nature Genetics, the American Journal of Human Genetics and PLOS Genetics.

Our applied work focus on cardiovascular disease, smoking/drinking addiction and lupus.

Functional Genomics:

In functional genomics, we work on two key questions: 1) how to interpret the functional consequence of GWAS loci? 2) what are the mechanisms that regulate genes to escape X chromosome inactivation?

To address these questions, we undertake a combined computational and experimental approach in order to identify causal genetic variants, pinpoint target genes and narrow down the tissue/cell types of relevance.

Microbiome Data Science:

In microbiome data science, we work on projects that leverage metagenomic datasets to study host genetics x microbiome interactions and understand mechanisms for antimicrobial drug resistance.