MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) Seminar Series

Title: Risky behaviors and their links with health: New insights from statistically well-powered genetic and neuroscientific studies

Abstract: Health outcomes are often partly heritable, genetically complex, and related to normal-range variations in behavior, socio-economic outcomes, and personality. Relationships between such normal-range variation with health outcomes can be exploited to gain new insights into the etiology of diseases. Here, we demonstrate this general principle with results from large-scale genome-wide and brain-wide association studies on risk tolerance and we explore their links with several mental health outcomes including excessive alcohol consumption. Our analyses are based on over one million genotyped individuals and more than 12,000 anatomical brain scans, allowing us to conduct statistically well-powered analyses that yield replicable results and precise estimates of effect sizes. 

Biography: Philipp Koellinger is full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Department of Economics (http://philipp-koellinger.com). His group investigates how genes influence human behavior, and how insights into the genetic architecture of behavioral outcomes can inform social and medical research. He is one of the principal investigators and co-founders of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) and holds an ERC Consolidator grant. In addition to various large-scale genome-wide association (GWAS) studies on social-scientific outcomes (e.g. educational attainment, subjective well-being, risk tolerance), he is also involved in the development and application of new statistical methods that use genetic data (e.g. the MetaGap calculator, GIV regression, tests for genetic heterogeneity in traits such as schizophrenia).

All welcome