Dr. Hyejung Won (Assistant Professor, Genetics) was awarded an R21 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for her project titled “Using H-MAGMA to decipher neurological bases of smoking and alcohol use traits”.
Genome wide association studies (GWAS) on smoking and alcohol use traits have demonstrated that those traits have strong genetic components. Nearly 400 genomic regions were found to have an impact on smoking and alcohol use traits, and the critical next step is to distill biological mechanisms by using a bioinformatic framework to interrogate neurobiological effects of genetic risk factors for these traits.