A Big-Data Approach to Women’s Health Research
Seminar Title: A Big-Data Approach to Women’s Health Research
Presenter: Dr. Ann-Marie de Lange, SNSF Ambizione Fellow at Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland
Dr. de Lange has background as a clinical psychologist with a PhD in neuroimaging and brain plasticity from the Center for Lifespan Changes in Brain and Cognition, University of Oslo. She studied brain ageing in large-scale population cohorts as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, UK, and in 2021 she established the research group FemiLab at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) in Switzerland. FemiLab focuses on how factors such as reproductive history and endocrine ageing relate to brain ageing trajectories and disease risk, how these factors interact with genotypes and common genetic variation, and how these associations may contribute to epidemiological sex differences in risk and disease.
Talk Summary: The emergence of big, open-access datasets offers exciting new opportunities in neuroimaging and population-health research. UK Biobank contains in-depth genetic and health data from half a million participants, with information on reproductive history, menopause, and hormone usage. Population-based studies can contribute to a more complete understanding of women’s brain health, but the complexity of large and comprehensive datasets also poses challenges. In this talk, Dr. de Lange will share her experience with using UK Biobank data to address women’s health related research questions, including challenges encountered in big-data analyses.
