PQG Conference - Sequencing and Complex Traits: beyond 1000 Genomes

Friday, November 16

The Program in Quantitative Genomics at the Harvard School of Public Health, jointly with the HSPH Department of Biostatistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, will host its 6th two-day conference on November 15-16, 2012 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference at Harvard Medical School.

The conference will be entitled "Sequencing and Complex Traits: beyond 1000 Genomes" and will engage an interdisciplinary group of scientists including statistical geneticists, genetic epidemiologists, and clinicians in a discussion centered on three important topics:

1. What do GWAS and sequencing studies tell about complex traits: is sequencing the solution to localizing missing heritability?

2. How should we design and analyze targeted, exome, and whole-genome
sequencing studies? How do we choose among these? Should population-based, extreme-phenotype, or family-based sampling strategies be employed?

3. How do population genetics and functional genomics inform sequencing studies of complex traits? How do we incorporate these types of information in the design and analysis of sequencing studies?

The conference schedule includes time for scientific presentations, as well as a poster session for submitted abstracts. Two abstracts for each of the three topics will be selected for Stellar Abstract Awards and presented as 15-minute platform talks. Each of these speakers will receive an award of up to $500 for travel assistance or other conference expenses.