Stream or attend a conference on Frontiers in Human Genetics at Columbia University (Oct 10 & 11), by registering here: events.columbia.edu/cal/event/even…

Excited to be joining this community of scholars striving to make genetics and science more equitable ☺️🙏🏾👩🏾‍🔬

Shai Carmi Roshni Patel et al. 2024 is illuminating re: why it can be difficult to distinguish signatures of the two. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Excited to share my 1st-author work from the Arbel Harpak Lab! We examine the accuracy of polygenic score (PGS) predictions across individuals in the UK Biobank. We make 3 observations that expose gaps in our understanding of PGS “portability”. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (1/28)

Relatedly, some cool recent work from Roshni Patel jeffrey spence Jonathan Pritchard et al. dives deep into expectations, based on models of natural selection, for allele frequency in a group B conditional on allele frequency in group A. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (18/28)

Introgressed ancestry is often selected against after admixture - why? Many possible reasons: genetic incompatibilities, locally adapted variation, accumulated load. Turns out, normal selection on quant traits (stabilizing selection) causes selection against introgressed alleles.

We know that DNA introgressed from one population into another is often deleterious, but why? Carl Veller and I show that stabilizing selection, by itself, can induce selection against introgressed ancestry. doi.org/10.1101/2024.0…

I wrote about some recent studies identifying widespread gene-environment interactions (GxE) acting on common traits, but through an unexpected mechanism. A few highlights 🧵:

In a new manuscript, we argue that confounding is a difficult problem to shake in studies of genetic influences on human behavior. (With John Benning, Olivia Smith (she/her), Ruth Shaw, and Arbel Harpak) biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

📢 Important cautionary tale on bias due to sample overlap. TL;DR - yes, it really is that bad. ☠️ Even when overlap is small (0.3-5% of training GWAS), PRS values show >2-fold inflation. Would love to see this explored across different PRS methods and in multi-ancestry settings

Really cool work from Juehan Wang and Steven Gazal providing evidence that genes differentially expressed across continental ancestries are enriched for GxE.

belated announcement that after six wonderful years with Jonathan Pritchard, I am now at USC (and very excited to be here!)

I am excited to share that I have started a postdoc at Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE)! I am so excited for all the new learning, collaboration, and projects ahead of me!

I would not be here today if I didn't have the chance to create the Genetics, Ethics, and Society class alongside Roshni Patel and many others. A note to grad students -- your outreach/advocacy/etc can become so much more!

Being the only/first out 🏳️‍🌈 person in academic settings is sometimes quite liberating and sometimes quite hard. I do not talk about the latter much because I feel that I must grin and bear it. I spend time listening to more junior 🏳️‍🌈, which is a gift, but can be heartbreaking.

New preprint out on biorxiv! I propose a model for the stability of sex chromosome systems based only on the operation of stabilizing selection on polygenic traits. This will be a short thread on the main results 1/ biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I am so thrilled to share that my book, Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA, is now available for pre-order! WBE&BB is a science-based rebuttal to common myths about human difference. #GeneChat #MedEd #DEI tinyurl.com/cmvpc928