The rich nature of the UK Biobank dataset provides extensive opportunities to answer multiple questions that are relevant to the diverse portfolio of work that is carried out at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. Our mission is to help prevent and treat diseases – particularly cardiometabolic diseases, but increasingly a wide range of common comorbidities – by conducting population scale research using cutting edge methods and a range of data modalities, including genomic and multi-omic data, electronic health records, imaging data, as well as lifestyle, environmental and physical measurements.
Our research will involve:
* characterizing patterns of disease and multimorbidity on a population level
* identifying genetic and non-genetic associations between diseases, traits and risk factors derived from diverse data modalities
* understanding interplay of genetic and non-genetic factors in diseases, traits and risk factors
* building, testing and evaluating predictive models of future disease events
* identifying causal risk factors and biological pathways for diseases
* understanding how electronic health record linkages can be best used for the study of diseases and risk factors
* using UK Biobank data to develop new methods to address the aims above (e.g. imputing missing data, methods for causal inference, multi-trait fine-mapping).
This umbrella application anticipates a broad set of interconnected aims that involve data from UK Biobank to primarily study risk factor associations and prediction of cardiovascular disease, often in conjunction with data from other large population-scale studies and consortia.