As part of the UMass Center for Research on Families (CRF) Tay Gavin Lecture Series, diabetes researcher Alisa K. Manning of Harvard Medical School will present “Leveraging Diversity in Polygenic Risk Scores for Diabetes and Other Advances in Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology,” in Arnold House, room 221, at 10 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 1. The lecture will also be available online via Zoom.

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In this lecture, Manning will introduce polygenic risk scores for common, complex diseases like Type 1 diabetes and Type 2 diabetes. Polygenic risk scores are a new precision medicine tool that uses 15 years of research in genetic epidemiology to obtain personalized relative risks.

In the U.S., the prevalence of diabetes is highest in African American and Hispanic or Latino communities and these patient populations are more likely to develop diabetic complications. To realize the precision medicine goal of early identification of diabetes and treatments targeted to the individual patient, Manning will show how her research takes advantage of multi-ancestry summary statistics from genome-wide association studies to create improved polygenic risk scores in diverse ancestries. She uses novel analytic methods in genetic and molecular epidemiology to study multifactorial diseases like Type 2 diabetes to detangle their complex architecture, enable translational research, and accelerate precision medicine.

Manning is an assistant investigator in the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit (CTEU) within the Mongan Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate member of the Metabolism Program at the Broad Institute. She develops statistical methods and applies them on large and complex study data.

For more information or to register for the lecture, visit the Alisa Manning Lecture form or contact the Center at crf@umass.edu.