I recently graduated from UCLA Bioinformatics PhD program (see my curriculum vitae for more details), advised by Bogdan Pasaniuc. I am broadly interested in how genetics impact complex diseases and their implications for advancing disease prevention and treatment. Specifically, my research focuses on developing statistical tools with population-scale dataset to answer two major questions:
- How to leverage genetic findings for disease prediction and prevention for all individuals, regardless of their genetic and socio-environmental backgrounds?
- How do genetic studies inform prioritization of key genes, pathways, cellular contexts to treat complex diseases?
Genetically-informed risk prediction across diverse contexts
Genetics has a sizeable contribution to complex diseases and traits, and therefore serves as a powerful tool to precision medicine. A critical barrier in incorporating genetics in clinical application is their context-specific accuracy-their performance varies across genetic ancestry, age, sex, socioeconomic status and other factors. I develop disease risk prediction tools incorporating genetics that benefit all populations to be used in future's healthcare system.
Calibrated
prediction intervals for polygenic scores across diverse contexts
Kangcheng Hou, Ziqi Xu, Yi Ding, Arbel Harpak, Bogdan Pasaniuc
medRxiv (2023).
Polygenic
scoring accuracy varies across the genetic ancestry continuum
Yi Ding, Kangcheng Hou, Ziqi Xu, Aditya Pimplaskar, Ella Petter, Kristin Boulier,
Florian Privé, Bjarni J Vilhjálmsson, Loes M Olde Loohuis, Bogdan Pasaniuc
Nature (2023).
Large
uncertainty in individual polygenic risk score estimation impacts PRS-based risk
stratification
Yi Ding*, Kangcheng Hou*, Kathryn S Burch, Sandra Lapinska, Florian Privé, Bjarni
Vilhjálmsson, Sriram Sankararaman, Bogdan Pasaniuc
Nature Genetics (2022).
Genetic architecture of complex traits in diverse populations
Understanding genetic architecture — how many genetic variants impact disease phenotype, how they distribute across the genome and how their effects vary across populations, is fundamental for human genetics study. These knowledge guide future study design and improve genetic risk prediction and faciliate drug target discovery.
Causal
effects on complex traits are similar for common variants across segments of different
continental ancestries within admixed individuals
Kangcheng Hou, Yi Ding, Ziqi Xu, Yue Wu, Arjun Bhattacharya, Rachel Mester,
Gillian M Belbin, Steve Buyske, David V Conti, Burcu F Darst, Myriam Fornage, Chris Gignoux,
Xiuqing Guo, Christopher Haiman, Eimear E Kenny, Michelle Kim, Charles Kooperberg, Leslie
Lange, Ani Manichaikul, Kari E North, Ulrike Peters, Laura J Rasmussen-Torvik, Stephen S
Rich, Jerome I Rotter, Heather E Wheeler, Genevieve L Wojcik, Ying Zhou, Sriram
Sankararaman, Bogdan Pasaniuc
Nature Genetics (2023).
Partitioning
gene-level contributions to complex-trait heritability by allele frequency identifies
disease-relevant genes
Kathryn S Burch*, Kangcheng Hou*, Yi Ding, Yifei Wang, Steven Gazal, Huwenbo Shi,
Bogdan Pasaniuc
The American Journal of Human Genetics (2022).
On powerful
GWAS in admixed populations
Kangcheng Hou, Arjun Bhattacharya, Rachel Mester, Kathryn S Burch, Bogdan
Pasaniuc
Nature Genetics (2021).
Accurate
estimation of SNP-heritability from biobank-scale data irrespective of genetic
architecture
Kangcheng Hou*, Kathryn S Burch*, Arunabha Majumdar, Huwenbo Shi, Nicholas
Mancuso, Yue Wu, Sriram Sankararaman, Bogdan Pasaniuc
Nature Genetics (2019).
Disease-relevant cellular context and pathway prioritization
Genetic study can nominate disease-critical genes but the mechanisms through which these genes impact diseases remain largely unknown. I am interested in exploring the best strategies to inform downstream functional experiments with computational prediction of [gene -> cellular context -> cellular phenotype -> disease] pathway.
Polygenic
enrichment distinguishes disease associations of individual cells in single-cell RNA-seq
data
Martin Jinye Zhang*, Kangcheng Hou*, Kushal K Dey, Saori Sakaue, Karthik A
Jagadeesh, Kathryn Weinand, Aris Taychameekiatchai, Poorvi Rao, Angela Oliveira Pisco, James
Zou, Bruce Wang, Michael Gandal, Soumya Raychaudhuri, Bogdan Pasaniuc, Alkes L Price
Nature Genetics (2022).
CalPred: Calibrated prediction intervals for polygenic scores across diverse contexts
admix-kit: Tookit for genetic analyses of admixed populations
scDRS: Polygenic enrichment distinguishes disease associations of individual cells in single-cell RNA-seq data