About us

Pronouns: she/her - Biology Major and Data Science Minor (‘25)

Pronouns: he/him/his - Haverford College Class of ‘23, Anthropology and Biology Major

Pronouns: she/her/hers - Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Major (‘24)

Pronouns: she/her/hers - Biology Major, Data Science Minor (‘24)

Why is this interesting? [under construction]

Balancing selection is an umbrella term for several selective mechanisms that result in the maintenance of adaptive genetic diversity in populations.

Investigations on different methods for PRS calculation, the effects of different modelling and pruning approaches, and transferability of PRS across ancestries

I was delighted to have been invited as one of the guest speakers for this series of talks, followed by an in-person discussion in Boston.

Listen here EPISODE DETAILS Hosts, Andrew Marderstein and Lucia Hindorff, chat with Barbara Bitarello on her work, " Polygenic Scores for Height in Admixed Populations" and what led to her career path. Check out the written interview by visiting the ASHG website. Link to the publication which the podcast is focusing on: “Polygenic Scores for Height in Admixed Populations”

Hosts, Andrew Marderstein and Lucia Hindorff, chat with Bárbara Bitarello on her work, " Polygenic Scores for Height in Admixed Populations" and what led to her career path. Check out the written interview by visiting the ASHG website. Read the paper here: “Polygenic Scores for Height in Admixed Populations” Listen here

Listen here. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) rely on the genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to predict the phenotype based on the genotype. However, the prediction accuracy suffers when GWAS from one population are used to calculate PRS within a different population, which is a problem because the majority of the GWAS are done on cohorts of European ancestry. In this episode, Bárbara Bitarello helps us understand how PRS work and why they don’t transfer well across populations.