Nilanjan

Chatterjee

, PhD, MS

Scientific research: Dr. Chatterjee leads a broad research program in quantitative research that cuts across multiple areas of modern population-based biomedical science including statistical genetics/genomics, precision medicine and big data. The scientific goals of his studies include discovery of new biomarkers, understanding disease mechanisms, characterizing disease risk and developing risk-stratified approaches to disease prevention. He has extensively collaborated in recent genome-wide association studies that have led to identification new cancer susceptibility SNPs, provided characterization of heritability, genetic architecture and gene-environment interaction, and led to better understanding of potential for genetic risk stratification for cancer prevention. Prior to joining Hopkins, Dr. Chatterjee worked at the National Cancer Institute for 16 years and led the Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics during 2008-2015.

Methodologic studies: Dr. Chatterjee identifies important theoretical and methodological problems in statistics from his applied research. Motivated from genome-wide association studies,  for example, he has defined novel and robust methods for analyzing genetic associations, and gene-gene/gene-environment interactions. He has provided mathematical characterization of power of polygenic risk prediction models based on underlying genetic architecture of diseases. Outside the realm of statistical genetics, he has long-term interest in developing statistical methodologies for building predictive models combining data from disparate sources. Most recently, he has shown how models can be built based on individual level data from a given study utilizing summary-level information from external big-data sources.