In response to PA-18-906 ?Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)?, we propose recruiting, training and mentoring an under-represented minority undergraduate student to do research during the three-month summer in our group. Our parent R01 aims to develop and then apply new statistical and computational methods to multiple large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) datasets with Alzheimer?s disease (AD) (e.g. IGAP AD GWAS and ADSP sequencing data) and other genomic/imaging/clinical traits (e.g. GTEx tissue-specific gene expression data, and ADNI and UKBB neuroimaging data) to comprehensively search and identify not only genes, but also brain regions and their functional connectivities, and other risk factors, that are putatively causal to AD. The trainee, who has already taken introductory courses in biology, computer science, math and statistics, will be mentored by PI and other research team members (mainly pre-doctoral students); coupled with necessary self-learning of some on-line materials, the trainee will conduct research with tasks on manual and labor-intensive data cleaning, checking and curation, and basic data analysis in generating some descriptive and summary statistics for the many datasets being used in the parent R01 project. The proposed research topics for the trainee are well within the scope of the parent R01 project. The trainee?s research will contribute not only to the parent R01, but also to helping further the trainee?s future career in biomedical research, thus promoting the workforce diversity.
The proposed recruiting, training and mentoring an under-represented minority undergraduate student doing research will contribute not only to the parent R01 project in discovering putative causal genes, brain regions and risk factors for Alzheimer?s disease (AD), but also to helping further the trainee?s future career in biomedical research, thus promoting the next- generation workforce diversity.
