BIG Retreat

BIG students and NHGRI trainees attended the NHGRI Research Training and Career Development Annual Meeting, April 2-4, 2023, in Salt Lake City, Utah.  

The Annual Meeting is a venue for trainees supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Genomic Sciences, Genomic Medicine and Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) fields to present their research and form collaborations with other trainees and established researchers from training programs across the United States.

Many students shared their research through the poster sessions. 

Above: Gwen Miller presents "Phylogeny-free estimation of parallel evolution"

Above: Daniel Stein presents "Spatial Priors for Cell-Type Decomposition in Spatial Transcriptomics"

Above:  Allen Lynch presents "Multi-batch single cell comparative atlas construction by deep learning disentanglement"

Above:  Sandeep Kambhampati presents "Connecting spatial organization of tissues to cell state and function using self-supervised machine learning"

Above:  Grace Moore presents "Extracellular vesicles of P. goldsteinii ASF519 may show biased loading of genetic material"

Above:  Alex Yenkin presents "Single-cell Analysis of Hypothalamic Organoids Modeling Prader-Willi Syndrome"

Above:  Shakson Isaac presents "Evaluating Clinical Risk Factors in Type 2 Diabetes Through Genetic and Environmental Metabolomic and Lipidomic Readouts"

Above:  Daniel Ben-Isvy presents "Characterizing the landscape of rare copy number variation across populations"

Above:  David Tang presents "Factorizing polygenic epistasis improves prediction and uncovers biological pathways in complex traits"

After a 2 year hiatus, the BIG Annual Retreat was held at the Seacrest Hotel on May 13 & 14, 2022, in Falmouth, MA.  The agenda included several talks from students, discussions, and lots of socializing!

The second annual BIG retreat was held at the Warren Conference Center in Ashland, MA, on September 13 & 14, 2019. The agenda included several talks from students and faculty, discussions, and many social events.

2019 Student Talks

Yixuan He
Poly-Exposure Risk Score of Common Diseases

Masahiro Kanai
Cross-population fine-mapping of complex diseases and traits

Aparna Nathan 
Multimodal single-cell analysis of 70,000 memory T cells from a Peruvian TB progression cohort

Raehoon Jeong
Why do some variants in transcription factor motifs not disrupt its binding?

Doug Yao
Quantifying genetic effects on disease mediated by assayed gene expression levels

Kate Lachance
The role of RNA degradation on mitochondrial gene expression

Alison Barton
Investigating likely-causal, coding variant associations from imputed UK Biobank exome data

The first all-BIG retreat was held at the Wylie Inn and Conference Center in Beverly, MA. The program included social events and numerous talks from students and faculty.

2018 Annual Retreat

2018 Student Talks

Jacob Luber
Discovery and Validation of a Gut Microbiome that Improves Athletic Performance

Tiffany Amariuta

IMPACT: A data aggregation strategy to infer cell-state-specific regulatory elements accurately predicts motif binding and significantly captures polygenic trait heritability

Luke O'Connor

Polygenicity of human traits is explained by negative selection

Rebeca Borges Monroy

Somatic Retrotransposition in the Aging Human Brain

Zachary Chiang

Mapping the epigenome in situ

Qingbo Wang

Landscape of multi-nucleotide variants in 125748 human exomes and 15708 genomes