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Research

Environment-Wide Association Study in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Date
20/09/2017
Hour
10.00 h.
Place
Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Sala Xipre
(Doctor Aiguader, 88) Barcelona
Speaker
Sek Won Kong (Harvard Medical School)

Dr. Sek Won Kong, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Computational Health Informatics Programme, will give a talk entitled "Environment-Wide Association Study in Autism Spectrum Disorder". 

He received his MD from Seoul National University College of Medicine, and was trained as a psychiatrist at the Seoul National University Hospital. He was introduced to computational genetics/genomics during his research fellowship in brain imaging of psychiatric disorders. He developed several computational/statistical methods to facilitate the translation of structural and functional genome-wide profiles in human diseases including a summarizing method of common risk alleles for the MedSeq project.

Dr. Kong developed a prediction model for ASD using blood gene expression profiles that achieved above 70% accuracy. He is currently working on supplementing this research with the identification of heterogeneous subgroups within ASD by integrating transcriptomic signature with sequence variants (genome), clinical characteristics (phenome), and environmental risk factors (exposome).