I’m broadly interested in research in statistical and population genetics. In my PhD project, together with my supervisor and a collaborator, I developed a new method to find genetic interactions affecting complex traits.

We have applied our method to nearly 100 traits in the UK Biobank, an amazing genomic and health dataset, and have found interactions affecting more than half of these traits and involving genes known to be relevant for important diseases such as asthma or Alzheimer’s.

We are currently generating and interpreting final results from this analysis and hope to have a paper detailing our findings ready very soon!

Beyond my own PhD work, I have contribued to the following papers:

Papers

Hu, S., Ferreira, L.A.F., Shi, S., Hellenthal, G.,* Marchini, J.,* Lawson, D.J,* Myers, S.R.* Fine-scale population structure and widespread conservation of genetic effect sizes between human groups across traits. Nat. Genet. 57, 379–389 (2025).

Ignatieva, A., Ferreira, L.A.F. Phantom epistasis through the lens of genealogies bioRxiv (2024).