Border Receives MIRA Grant To Advance Statistical Genetics

Richard Border, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science, has received a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

The grant will support Border's work in CMU's Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department to develop computational and statistical methods to better understand the genetic basis of complex traits. Border and his lab will develop new approaches to distinguish biological genetic signals from population structure, environmental transmission and other factors that can complicate analyses of large genetic datasets. The work will examine how relationships between genes and traits change across generations, including the effects of assortative mating — the tendency of people with similar traits to have children together — and vertical transmission, in which parents influence their children's environments as well as their genetics.

The researchers also plan to develop open-source tools and resources for the broader genetics community, including benchmarking datasets, probabilistic programming tools and computational methods designed to make whole genome analyses faster and more memory efficient. By developing methods that account for known sources of bias while scaling to increasingly large datasets, the project aims to produce more reliable and interpretable estimates of genetic effects.

The MIRA program provides researchers with support for a broad program of work within the NIGMS mission rather than a single, narrowly defined project. The awards generally provide five years of funding and are designed to give investigators greater stability and flexibility in pursuing new research directions.

For more information, visit the NIGMS MIRA website.