UCLA

The Genome-wide Association study (GWAS) is one of the primary tools for understanding the genetic basis of complex traits. In this dissertation I introduce enhanced statistical methods to do integrative GWAS analysis with functional genomic data. First, I describe an integrative fine-mapping framework to prioritize causal variants at known GWAS risk loci. Next, I expand upon this framework to exploit genetic heterogeniety across human populations to improve statistical efficiency. I then consider a new inference strategy to reduce the computational burden of the methodology. Finally, I propose a new approach for GWAS discovery that leverages functional genomic data through polygenic modeling.