Valentina Escott-Price
Area of Focus
- Alzheimer's disease
- Biostatistics
- Cohort
- Dementia
- Genetics
- GWAS
- Frontotemporal dementia
- Polygenic Risk Score (PRS)
- Parkinson's disease
Biography
The quality of my research is based on and strongly supported by my education in Mathematics and Statistics, my professional programming skills, and my expertise in Biostatistics and Genetic epidemiology. Since January 2002 I have been working in the Department of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University, now Centre for Neuro-Psychiatric Genetics & Genomics. Since 2018 I have joined the newly established Dementia Research Institute in the UK (UK DRI).
My main research interest is to deploy the new opportunities afforded by technological advances and large sample sizes in order to contribute to identification of new risk genes and biological pathways for psychiatric and other disorders, and to undertake integrative analyses to provide additional biological meaning to the basic genetic data. As a senior member of the biostatistics/bioinformatics group I am involved in supervision and performing advanced phenotypic and genotypic data analyses. As a member of several international consortia [Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PCG), International Schizophrenia Consortium (ISC), Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer’s Disease (GERAD) consortium, International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP) consortium, I supervise the processing and analyses of terabytes of genome/exome/sequencing data for cohorts of tens of thousands of individuals from different populations. Hence my recent research generated a world-wide interest, where we have shown that Alzheimer’s disease has a significant polygenic component which has predictive utility for Alzheimer’s disease risk and could be a valuable research tool complementing experimental designs, including preventative clinical trials, stem cell selection and high/low risk clinical studies.