Speaker Profile
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Systems Biology, Columbia University; Core Member, New York Genome Center
Biography
Dr. Yaniv Erlich is a Core Member at the New York Genome Center and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at Columbia University. Before that, he was an Independent Fellow/Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. Dr. Erlich received his bachelor’s degree from Tel-Aviv University, Israel (2006) and a PhD from the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2010). His research interests are computational human genetics and his studies were featured multiple times by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the international media. Dr. Erlich is the recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (2017), the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award (2013), Harold M. Weintraub award (2010), the IEEE/ACM-CS HPC award (2008), and he was selected as one of 2010 Tomorrow’s PIs team of Genome Technology. Dr. Erlich will join MyHeritage.com as the Chief Science Officer this summer.
Talk
Understanding Longevity Using 86,000,000 Individuals
The genetic architecture of longevity is poorly understood. To address this issue, we leveraged massive crowd source genealogy records of MyHeritage.com and constructed a single pedigree of >106 individuals spanning many generations up to the 15th century. My talk will report tracing segregation of longevity in families and testing complex hypotheses regarding the genetic architecture of longevity.
Session Abstract
Session Synopsis: Explaining human longevity at the molecular level is an emerging and tantalizing area of research activity. To understand and decipher the underpinnings of human longevity large data sources, including massive crowd source genealogy records, are being analyzed. This session will focus on applying newly developed informatics analytics in an attempt to unravel the genetic architecture of longevity.
