Pacific Biosciences is hosting a reception and dinner, and is screening their film The New Biology at this year's ASHG meeting.

While writing my thesis I came across this nice review by Rita Cantor, Kenneth Lange, and Janet Sinsheimer at UCLA, "Prioritizing GWAS Results: A Review of Statistical Methods and Recommendations for Their Application." Skip the introduction unless you're new to GWAS, in which case you'll probably want to start with this more recent review by Teri Manolio.

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.

I recently reformatted my laptop and needed to reinstall R and all the packages that I regularly use. In a previous post I covered R Commander, a nice GUI for R that includes a decent data editor and menus for graphics and basic statistical analysis.

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.

Note 2010-11-17: there's more than one way to do this.

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.