Dr Samuel Lambert - Department of Public Health and Primary Care

Assistant Professor of Health Data Science

Background

Before joining the CEU in January 2019, I completed my PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto (Canada) under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Hughes. My PhD research focused on the biology of transcription factors (TFs) – developing computational methods to measure and understand the diversity of sequences TFs recognize within and between species, and how this relates to the evolution of gene regulation. As part of the Cambridge-Baker Systems Genomics Initiative with Dr. Michael Inouye, I lead the construction of developed the PGS Catalog, to increase the transparency and reproducibility of PGS by distributing the information necessary for both research and translational uses of PGS for a wide range of diseases and traits. This work is in collaboration with partners at the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog and Health Data Research UK (HDR-UK).

Research Interests

I continue to work on various topics related to Polygenic [Risk] Scores (PGS), a method used to predict an individual’s genetic predisposition for traits and diseases. This includes the continued development of the PGS Catalog (available at: www.PGSCatalog.org), tools to make PGS calculations more reproducible (https://github.com/pGScatalog/pgsc_calc), and systematic benchmarking of PGS performance in diverse cohorts.

The second stream of research in my group is to combine genetics and health data science to understand and predict patterns of multimorbidity (two or more chronic conditions affecting an individual) that include common cardiovascular diseases.

Selected Publications

Lambert SA, Yang AWH, Sasse A, Cowley G, Caddick MX, Morris QD, Weirauch MT, Hughes TR. (2019) Similarity regression predicts evolution of transcription factor sequence specificity. Nature Genetics. doi:10.1038/s41588-019-0411-1

Lambert SA*, Jolma A*, Campitelli LF*, Das PK, Yin Y, Albu M, Chen X, Taipale J, Hughes TR, Weirauch MT. (2018). The human transcription factors. Cell. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.01.029

Narasimhan K*, Lambert SA*, Yang AWH, Riddell J, Mnaimneh S, Zheng H, Albu M, Najafabadi HS, Reece-Hoyes JS, Fuxman-Bass JI, Walhout AJM, Weirauch MT, Hughes TR. Mapping and analysis of Caenorhabditis elegans transcription factor sequence specificities. eLife. doi:10.7554/eLife.06967.001

Assistant Professor of Health Data Science

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Postgraduate Studies

MPhil Population Health Sciences

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