After completing her master in Psychological methods at the UvA (2001), Professor Eske Derks focused her research on modelling the influence of genetic variation on human behavior. In this talk, Eske will discuss how genetics research has advanced from twin studies, through Genome Wide Association studies (i.e., comparing DNA profiles in millions of patients and healthy controls), to the use of genetic data to improve our understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders. She will discuss how genetic data can be used to model genetic overlap across comorbid disorders, and to model phenotypic/symptom heterogeneity within disorders. Eske is head of the Translational Neurogenomics Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer, Brisbane, Australia and works in private practice as a psychologist.

This will be a joint presentation with Dr. Jackson Thorp, who recently developed Genomic Network Analysis (GNA), an analytic framework that applies the principles of network analysis to estimates of genetic overlap derived from GWAS summary statistics. GNA estimates the genetic association between traits conditional on all other traits in the network, taking an otherwise dense structure of genetic correlations and deconvolving it to a sparse genomic network that retains the most crucial associations. Once a network is estimated, properties of the network (e.g. topological features, sparsity, node centrality), can provide important insight into the structure and genetic architecture of the system of traits. GNA is available as an open-source R packageExternal link.