Stanford's campus is so beautiful. After spending five years in a windowless office building in snowy Minnesota, it feels incredibly motivating to now walk to work through Romanesque archways and neatly trimmed gardens on a 70-degree day in early February.

I wanted to keep this account focused on science, but it is hard to stay silent on political issues right now. My home country is still being bombed by Russia, the city I lived in for the past several years is under occupation by ICE, and the funding that supports my work is constantly threatened.

My second dissertation paper is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! Here we introduce the co-expression-wide association study (COWAS) method for identifying pairs of genes or proteins whose genetically regulated co-expression is associated with complex traits. 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

"The aim of equity is not to brag about how many students of a target background you awarded an A in calculus, it’s to ensure that every student actually learns." This is such an important and timely article. I have noticed a lot of the same issues myself. www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-grade...

This is an exceedingly late post, but I wanted to share a few pictures from #IGES2025 earlier this fall. I had the honor of giving a platform talk on age-related genetic dysregulation, and I really enjoyed connecting with other researchers and exploring the beautiful city of Cologne!

We can't wait to see you in Cologne this week for #IGES2025!! See below for some important reminders 👇

The use of dichotomized labels for traits that are actually continuous has bothered me ever since I started working on complex trait genetics. Sasha's blog post provides an excellent explanation of why this matters in the context of polygenic risk and embryo selection.

Yesterday I successfully defended my dissertation! It feels surreal to finally reach the end of my PhD journey at @umnsph.bsky.social. Thank you to my adviser Wei Pan and to my committee members @elock.bsky.social, @aazaidi.bsky.social, and Thierry Chekouo for your invaluable mentorship and support!

Excited to share my first PhD paper in the @sbmontgom.bsky.social lab with @tamigj.bsky.social (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)! Standard QTL methods treat each gene independently. But what if a single variant regulates multiple nearby genes at once - what we call “allelic proxitropy”? 🧵 ⬇️

Join us for our next virtual journal club! Jasper Hof will present on his paper "Fast and accurate recurrent event analysis for genome-wide association studies". 📅 June 16, 2025 ⏰ 11 am (EDT), 8 am (PDT), 5 pm (CET) 📍 Online Learn more and register: www.geneticepi.org/index.php?op...

I had a great time at STATGEN 2025 last week! Thank you to everyone who came to my talk and to the organizers for putting on this conference.

This year's IGES Annual Meeting and Education Workshop will be held Aug. 31 - Sept. 2 in the beautiful city of Cologne, Germany. Join us for an exciting lineup of keynote presentations, platform talks, posters, and hands-on tutorials at #IGES2025! Learn more: www.geneticepi.org/2025-annual-...

Follow @geneticepi.bsky.social to stay up to date on news and events from IGES! This will be the society's primary social media presence going forward, and we will be sharing a lot of cool and useful content. Full disclosure: I manage the IGES account.

A reviewer described my COWAS method as "a significant breakthrough in the study of gene-gene (protein-protein) interaction." Before that, the very same paper was desk rejected by four other journals. The moral of this story is obvious and left as an exercise to the reader.

I'm excited to share our latest work, now out in #PLOSGenetics! If you feel limited by linear models in TWAS or PWAS but don't think you can switch to nonlinear methods due to a lack of individual-level phenotype data, this paper is for you. 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosgenetics... Thread below 👇 (1/6)