Chris Wallace

Principal Investigator @ University of Cambridge

Senior Research Fellow and PI in the Department of Medicine

I am a statistician who works with biological datasets to understand the mechanisms underlying human disease and identify possible treatments.
During the GWAS era, we, and others, identified many genetic polymorphisms that alter risk of human immune mediated diseases such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. I now follow up this research in three directions:

  1. “fine mapping” the causal variants underlying these signals
  2. identifying the cell specific mechanisms through which these variants affect disease risk
  3. jointly analysing multiple immune mediated diseases/traits to borrow information between them and understand shared and distinct components of risk

Statistically, my current work is focused on variable selection, Bayesian model averaging and empirical Bayes false discovery rates, applied to integrated analysis of multiple related genetic and genomic datasets.

I am funded by the Wellcome Trust as a Senior Research Fellow and PI in the Department of Medicine (University of Cambridge) and hold an honorary Programme Leader position at the MRC Biostatistics Unit.