[BBC] PhD Opportunity in Genomic Privacy at the University of Lisbon

[Francisco Couto]

The BioSys PhD  Program is offering a PhD scholarship for the project: "What
are the determinants of human genetic individuality?"
The graduate will have the opportunity to work with world-leading
researchers from BioISI (BioSystems and Integrative Sciences Institute) and
LaSIGE at the University of Lisbon
under the supervision of Prof. Francisco Couto (LASIGE) and Prof. Margarida
Gama-Carvalho (BioISI)

Applications until *October 21st (12PM, CET)*
How to apply: http://biosys.campus.ciencias.ulisboa.pt/node/6

Objectives:
With the conclusion of the human genome project and the advent of
next-generation sequencing, research on the human genome advanced towards a
deeper understanding of human population diversity, focusing primarily on
the identification of common genetic variants. With this project we want to
evolve from studying the diversity within a population to the individual.
We aim at establishing a measure for genomic similarity (involving both the
sequence and structural levels) between an individual genome and a single
or group of genomes.  Genomics information can spell much more about an
individual than thought in the last decades, but the complexity of human
behaviour is enormous and the determinants of human genetic individuality
may be hard to predict from single genomic properties.
This project will follow a systems biology approach to reach for a deeper
understanding of the complexity of the human genome by analysing what
defines us as individuals. The main goal is to understand how well we can
predict if one specific person belongs to a group (for example, defined by
a phenotype) by only using genomics data. The results generated by this
project will be based on the intensive analysis of human sequencing
datasets. By identifying the determinants of human genetic individuality,
we will also be able to address some of the current concerns regarding the
preservation of individual privacy when addressing the prominent necessity
for data sharing [1].

[1] Cogo, V. V., Bessani, A., Couto, F. M., & Verissimo, P. (2015,
October). A high-throughput method to detect privacy-sensitive human
genomic data. In *Proceedings of the 14th ACM Workshop on Privacy in the
Electronic Society*(pp. 101-110). ACM.
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