Valdar, William, PhD

EMAIL: william.valdar@unc.edu

PERSONAL WEBSITE: https://valdarlab.unc.edu/

PUBLICATIONS: Publications Link

I run a statistical genetics laboratory interested the relationship between genes and complex disease. I have a particular focus on the use of genetically diverse experimental model organism populations, although also develop statistical methods relevant to human studies. Specific foci include: simultaneous modeling of the multiple heritable components of a complex phenotype (eg, additive, dominance, parent-of-origin, epistasis, sex-specific effects); characterizing model uncertainty in multiple quantitative trait loci (QTL) genome-wide association in both human and model organism populations; modeling and mapping genetic effects on phenotypic variability; modeling and mapping genetic effects on gene by treatment effects (GxT), including GxE; the design of mouse resource populations for medical research; and general statistical methods for analyzing data from inbred, outbred and recombinant inbred multiparental genetic reference populations (MPPs). In particular, my laboratory has made advances in the design and analysis of experiments on the mouse Collaborative Cross (CC), the Heterogeneous Stock (HS) mice and rats, the mouse Diversity Outbred (DO) population, among others.

I collaborate with researchers on genetic experiments that study a wide variety of biomedical outcomes including those related to diabetes and obesity, viral pathogenesis, behavior and psychiatric disease, and adverse reactions to therapeutic drugs. I am additionally a member of the Nutrition and Obesity Research Consortium (NORC), Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC), Computational Medicine (CompMed), Dept of Biostatistics (adjunct appt), and am Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD curriculum in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB).