The Raffield Lab is a human genetics research group in the Department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We work to identify genetic variants associated with hematology, hemostasis, and inflammation traits in diverse cohort and biobank studies and in collaboration with multiple groups and consortia. We then seek to link those variants to their molecular function through integration of functional annotation and rapidly expanding multi-omic datasets (including epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data), and to understand links between these traits and health outcomes including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and cardiometabolic disease. In all of our work we focus on improved inclusion of diverse populations, notably Black and Hispanic/Latinx populations underrepresented in genomics research.

For more details see the Research page.

Latest News

Raffield lab and Li group researchers present at ASHG annual meeting.

Researchers from the Raffield lab, as well as Raffield lab collaborators from the Li lab group had presentations or posters at the American Society for Human Genetics annual meeting (Nov. 1-5 2023). Brian Chen held his oral presentation Proteome-Wide Association Study Using Cis and Trans Variants and Applied to Blood Cell and Lipid-Related Traits in … Read more

Katherine Xing was awarded Best Poster Award

Katherine was awarded the Biostatistics Undergraduate Summer Internships (BUSI) Program End-of-Summer Research Symposium Best Poster Award for her poster Cross-Platform Comparison of Type 2 Diabetes Proteomic Signatures in the Jackson Heart Study. This award is given annually to most accomplished poster presentations at the symposium.

Madeline Gillman Appointed to Bioinformatics and Computational Biology T32 training grant

Madeline Gillman was appointed to the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) T32 Training Grant. Her proposal focused on QTLs for longitudinal ‘omic trajectory measures in TOPMed. Congratulations, Madeline!

Emily Drzymalla presented poster at AAIC

Emily Drzymalla presented the poster “Association between neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in large biobank cohorts” at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) meeting in Amsterdam July 19, 2023. We look forward to sharing a manuscript describing these findings soon!