Genetic Epidemiology Foundations

Taught by Dr. Nancy Cox, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In this module you will better understand genetic epidemiology from its origins to how modern ‘omics is integrated into genetic epidemiology of complex traits. Coverage includes introduction of liability and threshold models, genetic regulation of gene expression, and transcriptome imputation.

Taught by Dr. Bruce Weir, University of Washington. Methods and designs using genetic data are built upon the foundation of population genetics. In this module, you will learn these foundations, including the Hardy Weinberg principle, genetic drift, population structure, inbreeding, and linkage disequilibrium. These principles will be essential to subsequent modules in this course.

Taught by Dr. Todd Edwards, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Building from the introduction to population genetics, in this module you will learn processes that lead to genetic differences between populations, methods to characterize these differences, and how to conduct association studies in structured populations. In addition, you will be able to describe how admixture methods can be applied for association mapping.

Taught by Dr. Gonçalo Abecasis, University of Michigan and Regeneron, Inc. Quality control is an important step for high throughput genotype data. In this module, you will learn a range of different approaches to identify and to deal with quality problems at different stages of the analysis. In addition, genotype imputation is introduced to infer genotypes at markers that were not typed in the study samples.