Title: Investigating the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Using Statistical Genetics Methods
Summary: The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) contends that environmental exposures perinatally or early in life can have long term effects on future risk of disease. I will present recent research from my group that uses genetics to investigate this hypothesis including new statistical methods to improve the power of gene discovery in genome-wide association studies of perinatal traits, Mendelian randomization studies of maternal environmental exposures during pregnancy and future risk of offspring disease, and genomic SEM to partition the genetic covariance between perinatal and later life traits.
Biography: David Evans is Professor of Statistical Genetics at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an NHMRC Leadership Fellow. He completed his PhD in Statistical Genetics at the University of Queensland in 2003, before undertaking a four-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford where he worked as part of the The International HapMap Consortium and led the analysis of four diseases within the first Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. In 2007 he moved to take up a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Bristol where he worked on genome-wide association studies within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and other cohorts. In 2013 he returned to take up his current position at the University of Queensland whilst continuing to lead an MRC Programme in statistical genetics at the University of Bristol as part of MRC IEU 1.0. His research interests include the genetic mapping of complex traits and diseases and the development of statistical methodologies in genetic epidemiology including approaches for gene mapping, individual risk prediction, causal modelling and dissecting the genetic architecture of complex traits. On weekends he likes to surf and is enjoying the temperature difference between Queensland waters and the northern coast of Devon
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