The Daly Lab focuses on computational approaches to understanding the genetics of human disease using integrative genomics approaches. The lab has extensive experience in linkage and association analysis, with a focus on developing statistical methods for the design and interpretation of association studies, and applying these approaches specifically to major common disease areas such as neuropsychiatric disease, inflammatory bowel and autoimmune diseases, and diabetes.

The lab has extensive research in neuropsychiatric genetics – particularly autism, schizophrenia and ADHD – and leads large-scale GWAS and exome sequencing efforts and actively participates in Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC).  He also has longstanding efforts in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis where he helped found and lead an international effort identifying more than 250 genetic risk factors and extensive functional collaboration with Dr. Ramnik Xavier to study these.  Along with Dr. Rehm, he is co-PI of the gnomAD project and committed to ensuring the output of all ATGU research is maximally accessible and useful to the clinical and research communities.

I have more than twenty years’ collaborative experience in mapping human disease genes, including scientific leadership of the HapMap and 1000 Genomes projects to detect standing genetic variation in human populations; development of platforms and methods to perform genome-wide association studies in case/control and population-based cohorts; and discovery of hundreds of validated risk loci in psychiatric diseases (autism, bipolar, ADHD, schizophrenia), autoimmune/inflammatory diseases (Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, RA, SLE), and many other rare and common diseases. The lab today is specifically focused three main areas – extending insights gained from the many genes discovered to pursue the functional and clinical ramifications thereof (particularly in IBD in partnership with Ramnik Xavier), extending our analytic efforts in next-generation sequencing of psychiatric disease, inflammatory bowel disease and developing the gnomAD human variation resource (with Heidi Rehm), and developing biobank research through FinnGen and global biobank collaborations, including the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative.