UCLA

Exploring how genetic architecture shapes complex traits and diseases is a central premise of human genetics. Over the years, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled the discovery of numerous genetic variants associated with a variety of complex traits. In addition to the large array of traits analyzed, GWAS in diverse ancestral populations have also seen a significant increase in sample sizes. These efforts led to tens of thousands of publicly available GWAS summary statistics whose known correlation structure could be leveraged for further discovery. In this dissertation, I present two novel methods for the meta-analysis of GWAS summary statistics as well as conduct a pan-cancer meta-analysis of somatic variant burden. For one method, I present a likelihood ratio test for the joint analysis of genetically correlated traits and provide a per trait interpretation framework of the omnibus association. For the other method, I present a Bayesian framework that improves fine mapping of significant associations for one trait by leveraging the complementary information from distinct ancestral backgrounds. In addition to these methods, I analyzed how clinical and polygenic germline features influence somatic variant burden within and across cancer types.