Total Exposure Health, Bethesda, MD, September 6-7, 2018

For those of us trained in human genetics, we know that pretty much any trait or disease has a heritable component.  Yet, no matter how big, we also know heritability (additive genetics) is only part of story.  The environment, alone and in combination or interaction with genetics, and gene-gene interactions also affect phenotypes.  It’s complex, […]

2018 ABRCMS, Indianapolis, IN

Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS)
November 14-17, 2018 in Indianapolis, IN
Final Program

One Million Genomes: From Discovery to Health, Keystone Symposia, Hannover, Germany, June 4-8, 2018

The little paper that could.  What that might be?  You know, that little project based on a small sample size that generated big opportunities.  Ever had one of those?  Well, we recently did. The “we” in this post was our MetroHealth/Institute for Computational Biology Pilot study, affectionately known as MIPs.  Collaborators Drs. John Sedor and […]

The 2018 Wrap Up

What can I say–this end-of-the-year update is extremely late.  I mean, it’s February and 2019 is well underway.  I blame it on the polar vortex.  Actually, this was supposed to be a 2018 summer update, so it is not fair to blame the CLE winter for my tardiness. Ah, summer (Figure 1).  Where did you […]

2018 Precision Genomics Midwest Conference

As you may or may not know, I organize the annual Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology (CICB) annual symposium, otherwise and affectionately known as the North Coast Conference on Precision Medicine (Figure 1).  I organized the first one-day symposium in 2015, and I was pretty proud of it as we were the only ones in […]

2018 NIH All of Us Research Priorities Workshop

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that NIH has launched the largest effort to date to establish a cohort in the United States.  Chatter about the need for a nationally representative cohort bubbled up more than ten years ago in a commentary by Dr. Francis Collins (PMID:15164074), then head of the […]

2018 SACNAS, San Antonio, TX

SACNAS, San Antonio, TX, 2018 The Importance of Diversity in Precision Medicine Research Narrative:  National efforts are underway to ascertain one million participants for precision medicine research and an intense interest in ensuring this cohort is diverse across multiple dimensions.  We provide here an overview of the importance of diversity in precision medicine research highlighting […]

2018 SACNAS Graduate Student Oral Presentation Award

Melissa Spear University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA   The Role of Recent Demography in Shaping Patterns of Genetic Variation in US Hispanic/Latino Populations Melissa Spear, Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, Dara Torgerson, , Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco and […]

NIH All of Us Launches

It’s official—the All of Us Research Program launched on May 6, 2018.  For those of you unfamiliar with the All of Us Research Program, formerly known as the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, it is an ambitious effort to recruit at least one million participants in the the United States for precision medicine research.  Recruitment […]

2018 Joint Summits on Translational Science

For the second year in a row, I attended the Joint Summits on Translational Science, rebranded as the AMIA Informatics Summit (Figure 1).  Despite the name change, the locale was the same (San Francisco, CA) with slightly different conference dates (March 12-15, 2018), and the scope of the science remained highly relevant:  data science, translational […]