Title: Adjunct Associate Professor

Webpage: http://www.wpic.pitt.edu/wpiccompgen/

Research Interests:

Statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology

Bio:

I graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 1986 and I did a post-doc at the University of California, Riverside. The central theme of my research in those years was to understand how genes flowed, via pollen, within and among plant populations. It was a time when you could see the elements required to quantify gene flow coalescing. Genetic markers were becoming abundant, especially for model organisms and humans. With colleagues, I was developing two distinct model systems to study animal-mediated pollen transfer and the ecological and evolutionary factors important to it. What was obviously lacking was the statistical framework to model and understand the genetic data. Pursuing this framework became the central focus of my post-doctoral research. My colleagues and I built such a framework, which proved successful for answering some outstanding questions about gene flow. During that process, however, I found that building the framework – building a statistical model for genetic data – was as scientifically satisfying as my original quest, and it has become the principle theme of my research. Since then I worked as a biostatistician and research faculty in the Division of Biostatistics, Yale University School of Medicine (1990-1994), had a visiting appointment in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics (1995-1996), and have since been a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (Psychiatry and Human Genetics). I have been working in the field of human genetics for the past 23 years and in psychiatric genetics for the past 15 years. I plan to continue making contributions to these fields by careful statistical modeling of genetic data.