The group, consisting of seven postdoctoral researchers and five PhD students from the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, were at the Federal University of Pelotas in Rio du Grande Sul to deliver a seven-day programme, ‘Genetic and Epigenetic Epidemiology’, to professors, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students from across South America.

The course was conceived by Professor Caroline Relton and funded by a Partnering Award from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, to disseminate knowledge of genome- and epigenome-wide association studies and Mendelian randomisation to researchers in Brazil.

The funding also provided a means to build collaborations between researchers from Bristol and Pelotas, the latter of which hosts four birth cohorts (recruited in 1982, 1993, 2004 and 2015) and has many parallels with Bristol’s Children of the 90s study.

For a more detailed account of the Bristol team’s visit, please go to the MRC IEU news pages.