Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS)

Nikhil is a graduate student in the Pritchard lab at Stanford University. He is interested in statistical and population genetics, and is exploring the relationship between gene expression and complex traits during his PhD.

Leslie Smith is a 5th year PhD student in the Computer Science department at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the development of methods for addressing ascertainment bias in genomic datasets and disease modeling

Thea did her PhD research in the Lindorff-Larsen lab at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on explaining and predicting which missense variants are likely to change the cellular abundance of a protein. Concretely, she combines data from abundance MAVEs (VAMP-seq) on several proteins to study the cellular abundance of variants across protein backgrounds. Thea's talk will focus on what can be learned from such large-scale analyses, discuss why it can be difficult to combine variant scores from several MAVEs to supervise variant effect predictors, and finally present a potential solution to address some of these challenges.

Taylor grew up in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi River. He did the PhD in Brian O’Roak’s lab in Portland, Oregon, where he studied mutational effects on the cancer and autism risk gene, PTEN. For postdoctoral work, he moved to Ben Lehner’s lab in Barcelona, where he has focussed on developing and deploying massive mutagenesis platforms for understanding expression and function of GPCRs, the most important family of drug targets.