Biomedical Sciences Seminar

Deciphering Clinically Meaningful Genetic Effects Influencing Complex Disorders

Speaker: Olivia Veatch, University of Pennsylvania

This seminar will focus on computational approaches useful to making sense of the vast, and rapidly expanding, landscape of genetic factors involved in expression of complex disorders.

Topics will include:

• Approaches for elucidating pleiotropic effects of genetic mechanisms influencing expression of sleep disturbances in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders
• Using Phenome-wide Association Studies and electronic health record data to help characterize phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity in sleep disorders
• Using unsupervised machine learning to help identify genetic information contributing to distinct comorbidity profiles within patient populations
• Developing bioinformatics pipelines to prioritize genes/variants likely to be clinically relevant.

This seminar is also available on Zoom.

Olivia Veatch is a human geneticist working at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a Research Associate. She has a B.S. in Genetics from the University of Kansas, a M.S. in Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering from the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, and a Ph.D. in Human Genetics from Vanderbilt University. She recently completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Genetics of Sleep Disorders. She has received numerous training awards including a K01 Career Development Award from the National Library of Medicine. Her research has focused on uniting human genetics and bioinformatics to help translate big data into clinically useful knowledge. She is particularly interested in pharmacogenomics and characterizing pleiotropic genetic effects influencing expression of comorbidities, like sleep disorders, in neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions.