My research interests focus on genetic epidemiology in aging and applied biostatistics in medical and dental sciences. I have enjoyed working with my collaborators and am open to new collaboration.

I hold a PhD in biostatistics with special emphasis and expertise in statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology. During my postdoctoral training at NIEHS, my research was focused on design and analysis of large-scale genetic association studies. I have collaborated with experts in aging and developed my independent research. I have a track record of publications and funding using large cohorts including UK Biobank and Health Retirement Study to study genetics and epidemiology of aging.

I have identified and characterized genetic varians associated with aging traits. My group and I conducted a genome-wide association study for parental lifespan and identified genes involved in senescence and genes related to inflammation and auto-immune conditions. As a follow-up, we found that a missence variant in the SH2B3 gene was associated with extreme parental longevity. Using a similar approach, we found that the iron-overload, C282Y variant was associated with a number of clinically diagnosed mobility.

I have also used genetic variants associated with an exposure to investigate causal relationships between the exposure and aging-related outcomes, e.g. telomere length and age-related diseases and conditions plus common measures of human aging such as grip strength, frailty, cognitive function, and physical measures. Given what I had done with telomere length, I recently submitted a R21, which aims to delineate modifiable exposures that directly influence or moderate the change in telomere length across the lifespan, and how these influence health and risk of disease. Prior to that, I have a R21 funded by National Institute on Aging (1R21AG060018-01, role: principal investigator) to study the role of ApoE2 in aging. The aims were developed to study the intermediate effects of envrionemtnal factors and disease biomarkers in the relationships between e2 and e2-associated traits and to conduct a genome-wide gene-gene interaction study to identify and characterize e2-interacting variants.

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