Jonathan Marchini

The main focus of my research is the development of statistical methods for the localization and detection of disease genes in genome-wide association studies. These studies consist of measurements on thousands of individuals at up to 1 million locations throughout the genome. We aim to develop powerful methods that can extract the signal of association but at the same time account for the many confounding factors that affect these studies. Recently this has involved working  on genotype calling algorithms, detection of copy number variants, genotype imputation and haplotype phase inference, fine mapping, non-parametric association tests, detection of gene-gene interactions and algorithms for the detection and characterization of population structure. Much of this work has been stimulated by my involvement as an analysis group member of the International HapMap Project and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. I also have a continuing interest in spatio-temporal statistics applied to the area of functional MRI of the brain in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain.