John P. Rice, Ph.D.

DEPARTMENT OF Psychiatry
Keywords: mathematical modeling, epidemiology, genetics

Current research interests in my lab include method development in genetic epidemiology and the collection and analysis of family data on the affective disorders, schizophrenia, smoking, alcoholism and other substance-use disorders. Methodologic work includes: (i) the development of new measures of linkage disequilibrium to define SNPs for association analysis; (ii) the use of the logistic regression model to incorporate covariates into linkage analysis; and (iii) the incorporation of follow-up data into genetic models to allow for diagnostic evaluations at multiple points in time. We will continue to apply these new techniques to a number of currently existing data sets.

Our emphasis has been shifting from linkage analysis using several hundred repeat markers to association analysis using SNPs. We are expecting to get data from a case-control study of nicotine dependence in which 1.6 million SNPs are assayed in pools, followed by individual genotyping of approximately 20,000 SNPs. This new trend in the genetics of complex traits represents many challenges in data management and in analysis.

We also maintain genetic repositories for NIMH, NIDA, NIAAA and NIA. Future emphasis will be the use of statistical genetics and bioinformatics for the meta-analysis of the genetic data available through these repositories.