Friday, November 20th at 9am PDT/ 11pm CDT/ 12pm EDT
1-hour presentation followed by 30 minutes of discussion

Human disease is mainly due to complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors (GXE). We need to acquire the right "smart" data types—coherent and multiplicative data—required to make accurate predictions about risk and outcome for n = 1 individuals—a daunting task. We have developed large families of fully sequenced mice that mirror the genetic complexity of humans. We are using these Reference Populations to generate multiplicatively useful data and to build and test causal quantitative models of disease mechanisms with a special focus on diseases of aging, addiction, and neurological and psychiatric disease.

Speaker Bio: Robert (Rob) W. Williams received a BA in neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz (1975) and a Ph.D. in system physiology at UC Davis with Leo M. Chalupa (1983). He did postdoctoral work in developmental neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine with Pasko Rakic where he developed novel stereological methods to estimate cell populations in brain. In 2013 Williams established the Department of Genetics, Genomics and Informatics at UTHSC. He holds the UT Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair in Computational Genomics. Williams is director of the Complex Trait Community (www.complextrait.org) and editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Neurogenomics. One of Williams’ more notable contributions is in the field of systems neurogenetics and experimental precision medicine. He and his research collaborators have built GeneNetwork (www.genenetwork.org), an online resource of data and analysis code that is used as a platform for experimental precision medicine.

Presented by:
Dr. Rob Williams
Professor and Chair
Department of Genetics, Genomics, and Informatics
University of Tennessee Health Science Center