How do genes influence behavior? This week's guest, Prof. Jonathan Flint, fills us in, with a particular focus on how machine learning is uncovering connections between genetics and psychiatric disorders like depression.
In this episode, Prof. Flint details:
• How we know that genetics plays a role in complex human behaviors incl. psychiatric disorders like anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia.
• How data science and ML play a prominent role in modern genetics research and how that role will only increase in years to come.
• The open-source software libraries that he uses for data modeling.
• What it's like day-to-day for a world-class medical sciences researcher.
• A single question you can ask to prevent someone committing suicide.
• How the future of psychiatric treatments is likely to be shaped by massive-scale genetic sequencing and everyday consumer technologies.
Jonathan:
• Is Professor-in-Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in Neuroscience and Genetics.
• Leads a gigantic half-billion dollar project to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people around the world in order to better understand the genetics of depression.
• Originally trained as a psychiatrist, he established himself as a pioneer in the genetics of behavior during a thirty-year stint as a medical sciences researcher at the University of Oxford.
• Has authored over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles and his papers have been cited an absurd 50,000 times.
• Wrote a university-level textbook called "How Genes Influence Behavior", which is now in its second edition.
Today’s episode mentions a few technical data science details here and there but the episode will largely be of interest to anyone who’s keen to understand how your genes influence your behavior, whether you happen to have a data science background or not.
Thanks to Mohamad, Hank, and Serg for excellent audience questions!
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