# Discovering causal genes, brain regions and other risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA · 2020 · $8,796

## Abstract

Summary
In response to PA-18-906 “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related
Research (Admin Supp - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)”, we propose recruiting, training and
mentoring an under-represented minority undergraduate student to do research during the
three-month summer in our group. Our parent R01 aims to develop and then apply new
statistical and computational methods to multiple large-scale genome-wide association studies
(GWAS) datasets with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (e.g. IGAP AD GWAS and ADSP sequencing data)
and other genomic/imaging/clinical traits (e.g. GTEx tissue-specific gene expression data, and
ADNI and UKBB neuroimaging data) to comprehensively search and identify not only genes, but
also brain regions and their functional connectivities, and other risk factors, that are putatively
causal to AD. The trainee, who has already taken introductory courses in biology, computer
science, math and statistics, will be mentored by PI and other research team members (mainly
pre-doctoral students); coupled with necessary self-learning of some on-line materials, the
trainee will conduct research with tasks on manual and labor-intensive data cleaning, checking
and curation, and basic data analysis in generating some descriptive and summary statistics for
the many datasets being used in the parent R01 project. The proposed research topics for the
trainee are well within the scope of the parent R01 project. The trainee’s research will
contribute not only to the parent R01, but also to helping further the trainee’s future career in
biomedical research, thus promoting the workforce diversity.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10138238
- **Project number:** 3R01AG065636-01S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
- **Principal Investigator:** Wei Pan
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $8,796
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-05-25 → 2021-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10138238

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10138238, Discovering causal genes, brain regions and other risk factors for Alzheimer's Disease (3R01AG065636-01S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10138238. Licensed CC0.

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