Professor Yuehua Cui receives an NIH grant to develop new statistical methods for longitudinal Gene-Environment interaction studies.

People are exposed to a dynamic environment with mixed risk factors. To understand dynamic gene effects in response to a mixture of exposures over time, STT’s Prof. Yuehua Cui proposes novel statistical semiparametric methods and inference procedures, to study the synergistic gene-environment (G×E) interactions with exposure data collected over time. Dr. Cui is the leading PI for this two-year NIH R21 award titled “Novel Methods for Longitudinal Study of Synergistic Gene-environment Interactions in Complex Diseases”, together with co-investigators Prof. Kelly Klump and Alex Burt at MSU and Prof. Ping-Shou Zhong at University of Illinois at Chicago (Prof. Zhong is also an adjunct associate professor in STT). The developed method will be applied to a genome-wide association study of women’s binge eating disorder, with the goal to understand how genes interact synergistically with multiple hormones to affect a woman’s binge eating during the menstrual cycle.