Iain Mathieson

I am a D.Phil student supervised by Cecilia Lindgren and Gil McVean. Currently, I am working at the WTCHG on statistical and population genetics, particularly with application to disease association studies. My background is in statistics and statistical modelling. There is more information on my personal webpage.

The main projects I'm working on at the moment are:

Population Structure

I am developing methods for detecting fine scale population structure, related to rare variants, which may not be captured by genome-wide measures of relatedness. I am also looking at how the distribution and structure of rare variants differs from common variants, and what the implications of this are for association studies, particularly in the presence of spatially distributed environmental risk factors.

GWAS

Through the GIANT and DIAGRAM consortia, I am working on the analysis and meta-analysis of GWAS data for obesity and other anthropometric and metabolic traits. I am interested in models where the effect of a particular genetic variant may be moderated by one or more environmental factors.

Publications

Mathieson I, McVean G. Differential confounding of rare and common variants in spatially structured populations. Nature Genetics. 2012 Feb 5;44(3):243-6. PMID: 22306651.

Pagnamenta AT, Lise S, Harrison V, Stewart H, Jayawant S, Quaghebeur G, Deng AT, Murphy VE, Akha ES, Rimmer A, Mathieson I, Knight SJ, Kini U, Taylor JC, Keays DA. Exome sequencing can detect pathogenic mosaic mutations present at low allele frequencies. J Hum Genet. 2012 Jan;57(1):70-2. Epub 2011 Dec 1. PMID: 22129557.

Mathieson I, Munafò MR, Flint J. Meta-analysis indicates that common variants at the DISC1 locus are not associated with schizophrenia. Mol Psychiatry. 2011 Apr 12. [Epub ahead of print]. PMID: 21483435.