Dr. Raymond J. Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Statistics, Nutrition and Toxicology at Texas A&M University, will give a talk Friday (Feb. 20) at 4 p.m. in Room 124 of the H.R. Bright Building on campus.

Dr. Raymond J. Carroll

Carroll’s talk, “Robust Powerful Methods for Understanding Gene-Gene and Gene-Environment Interactions,” is part of the Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Systems Biology seminar series.

ABSTRACT
We consider population-based case-control studies of gene-environment and gene-gene interactions using prospective logistic regression models.

Data sets like this arise when studying pathways based on haplotypes as well as in multistage genome wide association studies (GWAS). In a typical case-control study, logistic regression is used and there is little power for detecting interactions. However, in many cases it is reasonable to assume that, for example, genotype and environment are independent in the population, possibly conditional on factors to account for population stratification. In such as case, we have developed an extremely statistically powerful semiparametric approach for this problem, showing that it leads to much more efficient estimates of gene-environment interaction parameters and the gene main effect than the standard approach: decreases of standard errors for the former are often by factors of 50% and more. The issue of course that arises is the very assumption of independence, because if that assumption is violated, biases result so that one can announce gene-environment interactions or gene effects even though they do not exist. We will describe two simple, computationally fast approaches for gaining robustness without losing statistical power, one based on the idea of Empirical Bayes methodology and the other on penalization. Examples to colorectal adenoma studies of the NAT2 gene and prostate cancer in the VDR pathway are described to illustrate the approaches.

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Raymond J. Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Texas A&M University. He is a member of the Faculty of Nutrition, a member of the Faculty of Toxicology and he holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He is the Principal Investigator on a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-funded Bioinformatics training program involving the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Agriculture and Life Sciences, this being the first R25T program funded at Texas A&M University. He has been P.I. of a major NCI grant for the development of statistical methodology since 1990, and was recently given a NCI MERIT Award, the first statistician to be so honored by NCI, an award that funds his research until 2015. He is the director of the Texas A&M Center for Statistical Bioinformatics and the Deputy Director for Research of the Texas A&M Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science.

Carroll’s work on statistical methodology has found application in a broad variety of fields, including marine biology, laboratory assay methods, econometrics, molecular biology, nutritional epidemiology and radiation epidemiology, among many others. He is one of the leading figures in the analysis of gene-environment interactions. He wrote the authoritative text on modern statistical analysis of data when exposure measurements are subject to uncertainties, the so-called measurement error problem. He has won many honors in the profession, including the 1988 COPSS Presidents’ Award, given annually by the North American statistical societies to the outstanding statistician under the age of 40. He gave the Fisher Lecture at the 2002 Joint Statistical Meetings, an award given by the major statistical societies in honor of a senior statistician whose research has “influenced the theory and practice of statistics.”

For more information please visit http://abcs.tamu.edu/abcs-seminar.html.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Both comments and pings are currently closed.