The Department of Epidemiology and Public Health Imperial College, St Mary's Campus, London, UK

Organization and funding: The Centre for Biostatistics at Imperial College (www.icbiostatistics.org.uk), jointly led by Professors David Balding and Sylvia Richardson, includes around 10 academic staff, 20 postdocs and 15 research students, based in several departments but primarily within the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the St Mary's Hospital campus. The research of the Centre is focussed on using advanced biostatistical methods to enhance population health. It has major strengths in the statistical analysis of genetic association studies and gene expression studies, particularly using highly-structured Bayesian modelling implemented via intensive stochastic simulation techniques. The latter exploit a local computer farm within the Department as well as the Imperial High Performance Computing centre. The work of the Centre is funded by UK research councils (MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC), research charities (Wellcome Trust, BHF), the European Union and the US NIH, and industry (GSK, Astrazeneca).

Key PIs and their roles: DJB is Professor of Statistical Genetics and LJMC is Senior Research Fellow, and both contribute to leading a team of around 12 postdocs and PhD students. LJMC will be the primary supervisor of the postdoc, and together they will deliver the principal research outcomes of the workpackage. DJB will offer and advice and overall supervision, and co-ordinate contributions from other members of the Centre for Biostatistics when their specialist expertise is required for the project. In addition to the deliverables specified above, the Imperial College team will provide specialist biostatistical advice to the MultiMod project partners as needs arise during the collaboration.

Five relevant publications
  1. A genome-wide association study identifies novel risk loci for type 2 diabetes, Sladek R, Rocheleau G, Rung J, Dina C, Shen L, Serre D, Boutin P, Vincent D, Belisle A, Hadjadj S, Balkau B, Heude B, Charpentier G, Hudson D, Montpetit A, Pshezhetsky A, Prentki M,Posner B, Balding D, Meyre D, PolychronakosC, Froguel P, Nature 445, 881-885, 2007
  2. A tutorial on statistical methods for population association studies, Balding DJ, Nature Reviews Genetics 7: 781-791, 2006. doi:10.1038/nrg1916
  3. Clinical factors and ABCB1 polymorphisms in prediction of antiepileptic drug response: a prospective cohort study, Leschziner G, Jorgensen AL, Andrew T, Pirmohamed M, Williamson PR, Marson AG, Coffey AJ, Middleditch C, Rogers J, Bentley DR, Chadwick DW, Balding DJ, Johnson MR, Lancet Neurology 5: 668-76, 2006.
  4. Logistic regression protects against population structure in genetic association studies, Setakis E, Stirnadel H, Balding D, Genome Research, 16: 290-296, 2006
  5. Improved techniques for the identification of pseudogenes. Coin L, Durbin R, Bioinformatics 20 Suppl 1:I94-I100, 2004.

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