Personal Statement - UTHealth School of Public Health

Personal Statement

Please accept this letter as my personal statement to apply to The Houston Laboratory and Population Sciences Training Program in Gene-Environment Interaction. My major interest is in genetic epidemiology, particularly as it relates to detection of causal genetic factors of complex diseases and the interaction of these causal variants with environmental exposures. I am particularly interested in the development and application of novel statistical methods to evaluate genetic and gene-environment data. I am applying these interests to the field of cardiovascular disease, the major cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and elsewhere.

I am currently a PhD student in Epidemiology at the University of Texas School Of Public Health, where I have work with Dr. Eric Boerwinkle as my mentor since 2010. I am involved in several research projects. The first one is a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of high sensitivity cardiac troponin T level which is strongly associated with incident heart failure and subsequent mortality in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study (ARIC). The second project is analyzing rare variants (minor allele frequency less than 0.05) using multiple statistical tests developed for this purpose. The most recent project I have been working on is to detect the influence of genetic loci and hundreds of human metabolites in African-Americans from ARIC. It is this latter project that has gotten me very interested in GXE. The human serum (in my case) metabolome consists of small molecules (e.g. amino acids and their derivatives) which are the product of multiple metabolic and physiologic processes combining environmental exposures and enzymatic (and other protein) processes. Therefore, the metabolome is the ultimate manifestation of GXE.

I will benefit from GXE program because of combines facets of biology, statistics/informatics and environmental sciences. In particular, this program will give me an opportunity obtain further training integrating population-based studies, laboratory sciences, and informatics. It is known that most complex diseases are associated with multiple genetic and environmental factors acting jointly rather than independently. The knowledge of these three important fields mentioned above is essential for a researcher to conquer the medical challenges in the future.

Most genome-wide association studies have not addressed the environmental factors and their potential to interact with genetic loci. For my project with the metabolome, I would like to extend this project to test the interaction between genes and environmental factors, especially diet. The statistical strategy is to test the genetic association and GXE interaction simultaneously. In the current project, we will analyze metabolites as quantitative variables and as multi-level phenotypes usually categorized in three levels ? low, medium and high. Most methods developed for GXE interaction have been designed for case-control studies using logistic regression that deals with two levels of phenotype. Therefore, I would like to try a relatively novel method to assess the genetic and GXE factors with multi-level phenotypes and apply it to a collection of approximately 100 metabolites showing low missing data and high repeatability.

I believe that this Burroughs Wellcome Foundation training program will help me to learn more and understand better the methods and strategies to analyze interaction between genes and environment, a current challenge in genetic epidemiology. My long term desire is to be a professor of genetic epidemiology and I also believe the training program would assist me in the accomplishment of my career goal. I would be honored to be selected to participate in the program and would dedicate myself in all program activities. Your consideration is much appreciated.

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