There will be a (free) tutorial on the 1000 genomes project at this year's ASHG meeting on Wednesday, November 3, 7:00 – 9:30pm. You can register online at the link below.

I know I've been MIA for a while. My defense date is December 3, and I've still got a thesis to write! I'll try to post more soon, but in the meantime follow me on Twitter for things that won't make it into a full blog post. For those at Vanderbilt and the surrounding environs: I saw this announcement for the next cancer biostatistics workshop that looked interesting.

About a year ago I reiterated a point made nicely in a Nature Reviews Genetics article, that there is no such thing as a common disorder - only extremes of quantitative traits. Such is the theme of this year's Annual Vanderbilt Genetics Symposium, "Beyond Disease Dichotomy - Quantitative Traits and Intermediate Phenotypes." This is a day-long event held at the Vanderbilt Student Life Center on Wednesday October 13, 8am-4pm.

Frank Harrell, chair of our Biostats department, will be giving a seminar entitled "Towards a More Rigorous Approach to Personalized Medicine." As a champion of methods and strategies for reproducible research, Dr. Harrell's lecture on personalized medicine should be interesting.

Will Bush and I just heard that our paper "Multivariate Analysis of Regulatory SNPs: Empowering Personal Genomics by Considering Cis-Epistasis and Heterogeneity" was accepted for publication and a talk at the Personal Genomics session of the 2011 Pacific Symposium in Biocomputing.

Rebecca Skloot, author of bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Amazon, $14), will be speaking here at Vanderbilt next Tuesday at noon in 208 Light Hall. This is one you don't want to miss. Be sure to get there a few minutes early. When 208 fills up they'll have overflow in 202 with a live webcast. RSVP to jane...@vanderbilt.edu for a free lunch.

A few weeks ago I suddenly reached the point that every graduate student once thought would never come - time to start writing my thesis. With a blank page and a blinking cursor staring me in the face it's time to compile all of my published and unpublished work I've accumulated over the last few years and wordsmith this pile of papers and results into a single cohesive unit.

Lucila Ohno-Machado, Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics at UC-San Diego, will be giving a talk on "Accuracy of Individualized Risk Estimates for Personalized Medicine" next week, August 18, noon-1pm in 202 Light Hall. This should be an interesting perspective from a scientist with medical training on the utility of personal genomics tools in making healthcare decisions.

A live webcast of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on “Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing and the Consequences to the Public Health" is available at this link. I had trouble viewing the webcast in firefox - had to save the link and open it with VLC media player to get it working. You can also follow the #HouseDTC hastag on Twitter.

You can find two nice recaps of last week's personalized medicine policy forum on Genomics Law Report and 23andMe's blog, The Spittoon.