Welcome to the website of the Statistical Genetics Group! The group is part of the Department of Epidemiology and Health Systems at the Unisanté and affiliated with the Department of Computational Biology, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Our group develops state-of-the-art statistical genetics methods to answer a wide range of questions in human genetics and epidemiology. These effort can be grouped into three major topics:
(1) We seek to discover unknown elements in the genetic architecture of complex human traits:
- gene-environment interactions
- parent-of-origin effects
- interplay between common and rare genetic variants
- signatures of stabilising selection
(2) We devise and apply novel causal inference methods to understand the non-genetic component of disease aetiology
- environment specific causal effects of risk factors
- causal molecular biomarkers
- causal effect mediation
- drug target discovery
- pharmacogenomics
(3) We repurpose genetically informed methods to reveal human behavioural patterns, such as
- assortative mating
- parental rearing effects
- study participation behaviour
- self-reporting biases
Most of our applications involve cardio metabolic disease outcomes and obesity and cognition-related risk factors along with omics measurements.