Dear Bioinformatics colleagues,
The human brain is one of the most complex organs in the body and much is still unknown about the genetic basis of psychiatric and neurological diseases. How do genetic variants associated with neurological disease change
gene expression levels, and how are these changes eventually lead to disease? We are looking for a
PhD student to help us get insight into these questions.
We have recently finished a large scale project where we combined over 8,000 bulk RNA-seq samples in human brain, after which we determined which genetic variants change gene expression levels in different brain tissues
and in different ancestry groups. We also investigated whether the association signals we identified on gene expression could also be overlapped with disease association signals. We are currently planning to further expand this dataset, to look into disease
specific effects, and long-distance genetic asociations on gene expression levels. The tasks of the PhD student include creating and running bioinformatics pipelines for genotype calling, RNA-seq analysis, and eQTL analysis, and method development for large
scale statitical analysis, writing papers, and presenting at (international) conferences.
If you, or someone you know is interested in learning about genetics, gene regulation and complex disease in the human brain, loves to work with large datasets, and is interested in a PhD position, please apply using
the link below.
With kind regards,
Harm-Jan Westra, PhD
University Medical Center Groningen