Upcoming Event: Babuška Forum

Combined Analysis of Imaging and Genetic Data from Tens of Thousands of Individuals to Study, Development, Aging and Disease

Vagheesh Narasimhan, Oden Institute

Abstract

Imaging has been the primary means of diagnosing as well as tracking the progression of many diseases for decades. Recently through the advent of large scale biobanks this rich type of data has become linked with genetic and electronic health care record data at the level of tens of thousands of individuals providing an unprecedented ability to study the relationship between genotype and phenotype directly in humans. I will discuss our groups work leveraging >1.2M medical images (DXA, MRI and ultrasound) from ~60,000 individuals across multiple views of the heart, brain, skeleton, liver and pancreas to provide new insights in 3 different domains of biological science: (a) to understand the evolution of the human skeletal form which underlies our ability to be bipedal (b) multi-modal models combining imaging, genetics and metabolics to predict 10-year disease incidence for common complex disease and (c) building biological aging clocks to study mechanisms of age acceleration/deceleration and to identify gene targets to combat aging.

Biography

Dr. Vagheesh M. Narasimhan is an Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Statistics and Data Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also Core Faculty in the Center for Computational Medicine at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Vagheesh initially trained in electrical engineering and computer science focusing on computer vision and information theory. He subsequently earned a master’s degree in biostatistics at Harvard University. He then moved to the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to pursue a PhD in genetics. During his doctoral work, he helped establish a large biobank —now comprising more than 30,000 participants—to investigate the effects of rare gene knockouts directly in humans. He subsequently joined the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow with David Reich and Nick Patterson. There, he led the analysis of one of the largest ancient DNA studies carried out, sequencing 523 individuals to reconstruct the parallel genomic histories of Europe and South Asia over the past 10,000 years.In his independent career, Vagheesh has focused on bringing together two fields that have largely developed independently: imaging and genetics. His laboratory builds computational methods to combine these modalities to improve disease prediction and discover new genetic mechanisms and therapeutic targets. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Biologics, the OriGen Health Research Center at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, the Love Tito’s Foundation, BioMarin Pharmaceuticals and Anthropic AI for Science. He’s also on the scientific advisory board of Colossal Biosciences and BridgeBio pharmaceuticals.