News

Aug 2026

Ajay Nadig's manuscript, Estimating the contribution of coding mutations to autism, was posted on medRxiv. Congratulations, Ajay!
Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani's paper, Defining and cataloging variants in pangenome graphs, was published in Cell Genomics. Congratulations, Pouria!

Jay Baik has joined the lab as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Jay!
Hui Li's paper, Improved heritability partitioning and enrichment analyses using summary statistics with graphREML, was published in Nature Genetics. Congratulations, Hui!
Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani received an NOA for his K99/R00 application titled “Unraveling Complex Disease Genetics Using Graphs and Graph Algorithms.” Congratulations, Pouria!

Amber Shen's manuscript, “Highly efficient genotype compression leveraging genealogical relatedness,” was posted on bioRxiv.
Luke O'Connor's paper with Guy Sella, “Principled measures and estimates of trait polygenicity,” was published in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
Luke O'Connor's preprint, “Self-Programmed Execution for Language-Model Agents,” was posted on arXiv.
The lab welcomed a new rotating Ph.D. student from the BIG program, Daniel Feng. Welcome, Daniel!

Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani's Preprint "Defining and cataloging variants in pangenome graphs", has been posted on bioRxiv.
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.04.668502v1

Luke's preprint with Guy Sella, "Principled measures and estimates of trait polygenicity", has been posted on bioRxiv.
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.10.664154v1

Ajay Nadig had his paper published in Nature Genetics: Transcriptome-wide analysis of differential expression in perturbation atlases. You can also read the accompanying News & Views article. Congratulations, Ajay!

Wenhan Lu presented a platform talk and Hui Li presented a poster at ProbGen 2025
Luke presented a talk, "Modeling effect sizes in cells and people," at the Broad Institute Brain Biology Meeting

M.D./Ph.D. student Ajay Nadig successfully defended his dissertation. Congratulations, Ajay!
The O'Connor lab welcomed new research assistant Shenghan Zhang

New preprint from Hui Li et al., "Improved heritability partitioning and enrichment analyses using summary statistics with graphREML"
The O'Connor Lab presented three posters and a platform talk at ASHG:
- Wenhan Lu - Heritability and effect-size distribution of rare and de novo protein-coding variation (platform talk)
- Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani - Comprehensive identification and characterization of genetic variants within a pangenome reference
- Hui Li - Improved heritability partitioning and enrichment analyses using summary statistics with graphREML
- Amber Shen - Efficient genealogical compression for biobank-scale datasets