Arjun Bhattacharya

Arjun Bhattacharya

Postdoctoral Fellow

UCLA

Biography

As of September 1, 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Please visit my lab’s website for more recent information and news about my work!

I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA with Bogdan Pasaniuc and Michael Gandal. Mainly, I develop statistical methods for genetic association and epidemiological studies and implement them to understand how biological heterogeneity influences health outcomes and disparities in cancer and neuropsychiatric disorders. I am also a Fellow of the UCLA Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences.

I graduated with a PhD in Biostatistics from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020, supervised by Mike Love in Biostatistics and Melissa Troester in Epidemiology. I was a recipient of the UNC Center of Environment Health and Susceptibility Training Grant and previously the Susan G. Komen Graduate Training Fellowship in Breast Cancer Disparities. During my graduate work, I have closely collaborated with Hudson Santos and Rebecca Fry at the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions to study the importance of placental genetic and epigenetic variation in the risk of autism spectrum disorder and other neuropsychiatric developmental disorders from a multiomic perspective. I graduated in 2015 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Biology and a B.S. in Mathematical Decision Sciences. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the Mackenzie Family Foundation Innovation Scholarship, a four-year, full scholarship given to only two students applying to UNC-Chapel Hill every year.

Interests

  • Statistical genetics
  • Genetic epidemiology
  • Functional genomics

Education

  • PhD in Biostatistics, 2020

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • BS in Mathematical Decision Sciences and Biology, 2015

    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Fellow

UCLA Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences

Jul 2021 – Present Los Angeles, CA
Teaching and consulting with experimental biologists in quantitative methods and approaches
 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (UCLA)

Sep 2020 – Present Los Angeles, CA
Statistical methods for genome- and transcriptome-wide association studies (with Prof. Bogdan Pasaniuc and Prof. Michael Gandal)
 
 
 
 
 

Graduate Researcher

Carolina Breast Cancer Study (UNC-Chapel Hill)

Aug 2017 – Aug 2020 Chapel Hill, NC
Disentangling sources of biological heterogeneity to study racial disparities (with Prof. Mike Love and Prof. Melissa Troester)
 
 
 
 
 

Graduate Researcher

ELGAN Study (UNC-Chapel Hill)

Aug 2016 – Aug 2020 Chapel Hill, NC
Analyzing multi-omic profiles from the placenta to study the etiology of developemental traits and disorders (with Prof. Hudson Santos and Prof. Rebecca Fry)
 
 
 
 
 

Graduate Research Intern

Roche Innovation Center

May 2016 – Aug 2016 New York, NY
Identified immunogenetic signatures from multi-omic profiles from clinicla trials to estimate immune infiltration in breast cnacner tumors (Data Science group of Traslational Genomics at Roche)

Recent Papers

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Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative: powering genetic discovery across human diseases

Lead TWAS analyst for flagship paper from the GBMI

Placental genomics mediates genetic associations with complex health traits and disease

Mediator-enriched placental TWAS of DOHaD