Journal Entry Week 1 20220829 - klmartinez/DSF GitHub Wiki

The aim of this first entry is to provide a brief introduction to my research as well as what I hope to achieve and improve on in my research through participating in DSF.

A brief presentation of my DSF introduction can be found here.

In summary, I work as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Karnes Laboratory in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Arizona. My research includes identifying genetic factors that underlie complex disease and adverse drug reactions.

As part of the Karnes Lab, my research generally falls under the umbrella of precision medicine (an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person), and specifically in pharmacogenomics (an approach used by precision medicine focused on the study of how genes affect a person's response to drugs).

Currently, my research primarily focuses on using large genomic datasets to identify genetic variants that are associated with complex disease and adverse drug reactions, often by employing genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods, in diverse and admixed cohorts. Specifically, I have three ongoing projects: 1) examining local and global ancestry in a self-identified Hispanic/Latino cohort in relation to pharmacogenetic variants associated with Warfarin, 2) identifying disease associations to ABO blood groups in the AllofUs study using a PheWAS approach, and 3) identifying genomic risk factors for heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) in the AllofUs study using a GWAS approach.

I believe that my experience in DSF will provide me tools to conduct more reproducible and collaborative projects. For example, I have very little experience with GitHub, and learning about GiHub Wiki pages this past week was already very beneficial. I can now create repositories and share Wiki pages and files via GitHub which already provides me a platform to make my work and code more accessible. I also hope to develop better data management skills and coding skills.