SABITALKS / Data Structure, Disease Risk, Interactions of Genes and Environments, and Causal Modeling (now with AI help)
Robert, Williams from University of Tennessee Health Science Center is going to be at SABITALKS on May 6, 2025 at 15:00. The event will take place online.
*Participants from outside SABITA must fill in the participation form.
Data Structure, Disease Risk, Interactions of Genes and Environments, and Causal Modeling (now with AI help)
In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, the very concept of “data” has evolved—both in scale and in complexity. In this talk, we explore the critical role of data structure in understanding disease risk and unraveling the intricate interactions between genes and environments. Traditional models often struggle to capture the multilayered, dynamic relationships inherent in biological and environmental systems. With the advent of AI tools, we are now equipped to model these complexities more robustly, allowing for more precise causal inference and risk prediction. The presentation will cover foundational principles of data organization, the challenges posed by high-dimensional and heterogeneous datasets, and how modern AI methodologies—ranging from machine learning algorithms to causal discovery frameworks—are transforming biomedical research.
Robert (Rob) W. Williams received a BA in neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz (1975) and a Ph.D. in physiology at UC Davis with Leo M. Chalupa (1983). He did postdoctoral work in developmental neurobiology at Yale with Pasko Rakic and moved to the University of Tennessee in 1989. He is chair of the Department of Genetics, Genomics and Informatics and holds the UT Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair in Computational Genomics. He was president of the International Society for Behavioural and Neural Genetics and is founding director of the Complex Trait Community (www.complextrait.org). He was editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Neurogenomics for over a decade, and serves on the editorial boards of Genes, Brain & Behavior, EBM, Neuroinformatics, Mammalian Genome, Molecular Vision, Alcohol, BiomedCentral Neuroscience, the Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration, and Behavior Genetics.
One of Williams’ more notable contributions is in the field of systems genetics and expression genetics. He and his research group have built GeneNetwork (www.genenetwork.org), an online resource and suite of phenotype and genotype data and analysis code that is used widely by the genetics and molecular biology communities.