[Isl] Brown Bag Series Lecture Featuring Hongyuan Cao

[Institute for Successful Longevity]

Good afternoon,



We would like to announce that we will be having our fourth Brown Bag Lecture Series talk with Dr. Hongyuan Cao on February 5th at 12 PM. We will be serving a light lunch for those attending in person.





Title: "Heritability: a counterfactual perspective"



Abstract: Nature versus nurture is fundamental in behavioral, biological, and medical sciences. Central to it is the concept of heritability, a quantity that measures how much genes contribute to complex human traits. The "missing heritability problem” is a great scientific puzzle identified by the Human Genome Project: there is a substantial gap between heritability estimates from population-based cohorts and those from twin data. Up to now, there is no widely accepted solution to this dilemma and our theoretical understanding of the problem is still limited. Inspired by the twin design, we define heritability by contrasting the factual value of the trait with its counterfactual value under the same environmental exposure and an “independent draw” of genetic variants. This new notion offers a more nuanced understanding of the genetic and environmental contributions and their interactions. A particularly interesting feature is that, without strong untestable assumptions, we can only obtain bounds (but not precise estimates) of counterfactual heritability. We provide conditions for partial identification of this new notion with and without covariates in completely randomized experiments. In addition, we compare it with commonly used definitions of heritability in genetics through simulation studies. Our analysis sheds light on the important missing heritability problem.



Bio: Hongyuan Cao is a professor of statistics at Florida State University. She got her PhD in statistics from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research interests include causal inference, genetics, reinforcement learning, SMART trial, survival analysis and their applications in public health, medicine and social science. She is an elected fellow of American Statistical Association.





To RSVP for in-person, use the link below. RSVP for in person by Monday, February 3rd, 2025:

https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1XjnDnDVP4Hv7Rc<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffsu.qualtrics.com%2Fjfe%2Fform%2FSV_1XjnDnDVP4Hv7Rc&data=05%7C02%7Cisl%40lists.fsu.edu%7C5531e6b7559c4ca65a4608dd40a59768%7Ca36450ebdb0642a78d1b026719f701e3%7C0%7C0%7C638737802123083534%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=WGy38LjTXM5O0l5JD0%2B9toxNyv4QhF8kbr6praxDIuw%3D&reserved=0>





To RSVP for Zoom, use the following link:

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