December 6, 2024

11am - noon
Biomedical Sciences Research Building - Room #483

UCLA CRSHE Seminar Series with Aditya Pimplaskar

"Leveraging polygenic scores to investigate the genetics of perinatal depression"

Talk Description: Perinatal depression (PND) is a depressive illness affecting ~20-25% of mothers during pregnancy as well as after birth, leading to increased risk for adverse outcomes in both mothers and children. Compared to other psychiatric illnesses, PND is understudied; as such, there is a need for well-powered genetic and clinical studies of PND to generate reliable estimates of polygenic risk and understanding of disease etiology. In this work, we analyze a broader perinatal depression phenotype in various health system linked biobanks, leveraging clinical and genetic data for risk prediction. We compare genetic risk for a variety of psychiatric and pregnancy-related traits between PND and non-PND pregnancies, and further use these genetic risk estimates to distinguish PND from non-PND depression.

Bio: Aditya Pimplaskar is a PhD candidate in the Bioinformatics program at UCLA, advised by Dr. Loes Olde Loohuis. His primary research focus is the use of biobanks for precision medicine, specifically in psychiatric genetics. His work includes phenotyping methods from electronic health records, genetic risk estimation for complex traits, and assessments of the impact of biases in biobank studies. Prior to his graduate studies, he completed his undergraduate studies at UCLA in Computational Biology and mathematics.