Description:

Dara Torgerson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine, Lung Biology Center
University of California, San Francisco

The prevalence and morbidity of asthma and bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) varies by racial/ethnic group, suggesting that the genetic variation that contributes to disease may similarly vary in frequency between populations. Patterns of genetic variation differ greatly by continental ancestry, with recent human migration and subsequent admixture adding to the genetic diversity present in modern-day humans. Furthermore, the majority of variants in humans are rare and population specific, with 94% of nonsynonymous variants in the Thousand Genomes Project at a frequency < 1%. Thus, for complex diseases governed by multiple genes, we should expect rare variants to play an important role, and to be predominantly population-specific in their effect. In this talk, I will present the results of genetic association studies for asthma and BPD, and demonstrate the utility of integrating ancestry information to empower genetic association studies in diverse and admixed populations.

Dara Torgerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Lung Biology Center at the University of California San Francisco. She obtained her PhD from McMaster University, and Postdoctoral training from Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She specializes in computational biology, and her research is centered on developing bioinformatic and statistical approaches for genetic studies of complex disease in diverse populations.

Seminar host:
Aaron Hamvas, MD
Raymond and Hazel Speck Barry Professor of Neonatology
Head, Division of Neonatology
Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine