Harald Goring, PhD

Research Focus

To what degree do we inherit predisposition to disease, life expectancy, and personal skills, predilections, and behaviors? What are the specific genetic factors involved in shaping these characteristics? To address these questions, Dr. Göring’s research group works on two aspects of genetic epidemiology, the development of statistical methods for genetic analysis and the application of those methods to well-designed human datasets.

On the methodological front, one current project of Dr. Göring’s research group is to develop ways to localize and identify rare genomic variants with strong phenotypic impact on complex traits in extended pedigree samples. Specifically, his research group is taking advantage of genotyped rare variants from whole genome sequence data to phase and impute missing genotype data, and they are developing methods for assessing the phenotypic effect of unique chromosome segments (found only in a single pedigree founder and his/her descendants) on disease and disease-related quantitative risk factors.

On the applied front, Dr. Göring’s research group is involved in several studies that integrate genotypic data and other “omics” technology-generated data to unravel trait etiology.  A recent project involves the search for differences in gene expression between schizophrenic individuals and controls.  His research group is examining the expression patterns of case and control lymphoblastoid cell lines (from both European ancestry and African American individuals) before and after stimulation with the neurotransmitter dopamine, with the hope that the identified differences reveal information about the etiology of schizophrenia.

Dr. Göring’s group is also seeking to identify early metabolomic biomarkers for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. They are characterizing the metabolome of blood plasma samples using a highly sensitive separation methodology (untargeted two-dimensional gas chromatography approach coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry) to identify specific molecules or chemical signatures that predict elevated risk of disease onset. One metabolomic project is focused on large Mexican American families, and another project involves Sikhs from India.