William Bush
University of Miami, FL·Genetics
Most of what is known about the genetics of Alzheimer disease comes from studies of people of European ancestry, and the evidence so far suggests that different ancestry groups carry partly different genetic risk factors. That gap matters for predicting who will develop the disease and for understanding its biology.
- Fields
Genetics
Computer Science
Neuroscience
- Topics
Alzheimer disease
dementia
statistical genetics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Identify genetic risk factors for Alzheimer disease that are distinct to African American, African, and Hispanic/Latino populations through multiple statistical analyses of genetic data generated in these cohorts.
- Develop and apply methods that pinpoint regulatory elements, the DNA stretches controlling gene activity, and that leverage admixed chromosomes, the mosaic ancestry patterns characteristic of these populations.
- Combine discovery results into polygenic risk scores and pathway analyses to name the molecular mechanisms harboring variants that influence Alzheimer risk in each population studied.
More about the research
This project searches for the genetic factors specific to populations that have been underrepresented in earlier work.
Why it matters
Alzheimer genetics has been studied mostly in European-ancestry populations, which limits how well risk estimates and biological insights transfer to African American, African, and Hispanic/Latino communities. Identifying ancestry-specific risk variants and the pathways they act through could improve genetic risk prediction for these groups and point to disease mechanisms that European-focused studies would miss.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mateus Gouveia
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Genetics·Early-career
Map subcontinental ancestries across Africa, the Americas, and Europe by assembling genome-wide data on roughly 75,000 ancestrally diverse individuals and applying current population genomics methods.
Penny Gordon-Larsen
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify gene-expression signals underlying severe obesity using whole-blood RNA sequencing from more than 15,000 people, and build ancestry-informed eQTL maps for underrepresented populations.
Gary Beecham
Wake Forest University, NC·Genetics
Identify new genetic variants linked to early-onset Alzheimer's disease without APP, PSEN1 or PSEN2 mutations, using whole-genome sequencing with family linkage and case-control association analyses.
The school
University of Miami: 30 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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