Mathematics professor Qiuying Sha studies statistical genetics and is ready to do health by the numbers.
Sha is the new Portage Health Foundation Endowed Professor of Population Health. In her new role, she wants to make sure people arent treated as numbers in a systemrather number crunching should work in favor of peoples individual health.
You can tell the person from the data, Sha says. Im a statistician, so when I apply for funding or pursue research its always with dataand in this new role, Ill be able to help on data analysis-tell what the data says and find any patterns from the data.
Specifically, Sha plans to develop statistical models for personalized medicinea practice where lots of genetic data, family information, and medical history inform recommendations for an individual persons medical treatment. Her work could also be applied to genetic screenings to help catch early signs of diseases and assist with preventative care.
Sha is joining health care specialists, inventors, movers and shakers to push for better health science in the Upper Peninsula through a $2.5 million grant from the Portage Health Foundation. Michigan Tech will match and exceed the grant, bringing the total to more than $6 million; the funds will support two other endowed professors focusing on health tech and community health. The five-year grant also makes scholarships available to undergraduate students, helps support graduate student positions and funds research to improve health infrastructure and economic growth in Keweenaw, Houghton, Baraga and Gogebic counties.
For Sha, she sees this as an opportunity to give back to her community.
I moved here in 2001so Ive been living here for 16 yearsand Im happy to help make the community better, its really exciting, she says. Im eager to work with local people and to see what I can do to help our community, to make the community better.
Specifically, Sha works in a field called genetic epidemiology. That means she applies statistical methods to genetic data to identify the genes responsible for a particular disease. She analyzes DNA sequences from the whole genome. Her work gets nitty-gritty: she looks at the building blocks of DNAnucleotidesand variations that occur at key locations in the genome. These are called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPpronounced like snip) and there are close to 10 million SNPs in the human genome.
So, we say, okay, lets find which genes are associated with a disease, Sha explains, adding that she targets the locations of causal SNPs in her analyses because they may indicate an increased risk of a disease. But thats a challenge because our data, all those SNPs, become a very large dataset.
Once all the dataset is wrangled, though, Sha is able to study the risk for individuals and the prevalence of diseases in a given population. She has applied statistical genetic analyses to hypertension, type II diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers and ALS.
"We live in the age of 'big data', and Sha's research can help us better understand if certain genetic and/or environmental factors are contributing to chronic diseases in our area," says Jason Carter, who is the lead researcher on the Portage Health Foundation grant and the Chair of the Department of Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology at Michigan Tech. "People ask me all the timedo we have a higher incidence of cancer in our area, and if so, why? These are the types of questions Sha can help us address, which will allow us to provide better and more targeted care and preventative interventions for our community."
Kevin Store, the executive director of the Portage Health Foundation, says Sha's background in statistical genetics research will bring a different perspective to projects.
By digging deeper into the numbers, Sha can help personalize medicine. The first step is decrypting the genetic code of diseases and their triggers.
Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than 7,000 students from 60 countries around the world. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science, engineering and technology; forestry; business and economics; health professions; humanities; mathematics; and social sciences.
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Portage Health Foundation Endowed Professor Brings Big Data to Rural Medicine - Michigan Tech News (press release)
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