News

August 3, 2021

Congratulations to Marcus who defended his DPhil thesis today! Marcus' thesis title is "The Impact of Genetic Drift on the Distribution and Uses of Linkage Disequilibrium". Marcus was co-supervised by Gil McVean, his primary supervisor, and was examined by Ryan Hernandez and Danny Wilson. As is customary with the time, his viva was held on Zoom.

June 3, 2021

Robbie and colleagues published "Rapid genotype imputation from sequence with reference panels" in Nature Genetics. This study introduced QUILT, a novel method for low coverage sequence imputation using large reference panels. This paper demonstrated the accuracy of the method using a variety of data types, and showed it was more cost effective than microarrays, especially for non-European populations.

paper here Tweetorial here

Nov 9, 2020

Robbie and colleagues published "Using common genetic variation to examine phenotypic expression and risk prediction in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome" in Nature Medicine. Investigating a cohort of 962 individuals with 22q11DS, this study had two main objectives. First, to examine the shared genetic basis between schizophrenia and schizophrenia-related early trajectory phenotypes. Second, in this population at elevated risk of schizophrenia and intellectual disability, to evaluate the use of polygenic scores for individual risk prediction. You can learn more by reading the paper, or a short Tweetorial from senior author Jacob Vorstman, by clicking below.

paper here Tweetorial here

Sept 9, 2020

Marcus joins the lab as a co-supervised student. Marcus is co-supervised by Gil McVean, who recently left the University of Oxford to work at Genomics plc full time. Marcus' work investigates the transferability of linkage disequilibrium, and other population genetic statistics, across diverse populations. This work is motivated in the context of GWAS studies to better analyse summary statistics, for example through better summary statistic imputation.

Nov 20, 2019

Luis joins the lab, having completed one year as a SABS DPhil student and passing his initial SABS viva. Luis is co-supervised by Simon, as well as Satu and Tony from Roche. Luis will investigate genetic heterogeneity in ASD with a goal of stratifying individuals into those most likely to respond to specific interventions.

July 8, 2019

Robbie starts as an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics.

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