Our Genomes, Our Selves?

The initial draft sequence of the human genome, published in 2001, promised to usher the world towards personalized medicine, in which a patient’s genome is used to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Almost twenty years later, many clinically actionable mutations have been identified and are incorporated into treatment, and medical genomics offers exciting opportunities for data-driven discoveries about the genomic underpinnings of health. As increasingly large genomic datasets merged with medical records become available to researchers and the public turns to direct-to-consumer companies for genomic analysis, challenging humanistic issues surrounding privacy, preexisting conditions, ancestry, and kinship abound. As a human population geneticist, I study the evolutionary forces that produce and maintain genetic variation in our species. I’ll describe a series of fundamental challenges for interpreting results from direct-to-consumer genetic testing and for making personalized medicine a reality for all.

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By and featuring Dr. Ramachandran

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Speaker Details

Sohini Ramachandran has been a faculty member at Brown University since 2010, and is currently Director of Brown University’s Data Science Initiative and Center for Computational Molecular Biology. Research in the Ramachandran lab addresses problems in population genetics and evolutionary theory, generally using humans as a study system. Sohini’s work uses mathematical modeling, applied statistical methods, and computer simulations to make inferences from genetic data. Her lab answer questions like: what loci are under strong adaptive selection in the human genome? are there genetic pathways we can identify that underlie common diseases such as diabetes? does genetic variation account for some ethnic disparities in disease incidence and outcome? what features of human demographic history can we infer from genetic data alone? In additional to being funded by the National Institutes of Health, Sohini has been a Sloan Research Fellow, Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, and an NSF CAREER awardee.

Series: Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series