Congratulations to Andrea Byrnes. She successfully defended her dissertation!
Title: Quantitative Methods for Evaluating Association between Rare Genetic Variants and Complex Human Traits.
Rare variants pose a problem for conventional methods of association analysis because of dismally low power. In response, this dissertation tests new quantitative methods for the aggregation of information contained in rare variants that will allow the study of biological effects despite their rarity. Topics include rare variant aggregation for GWAS data (PMID: 21055717), use of annotation and variable selection (PMID: 23836599), and rare variant association for admixed data.