Identify genetic and other factors associated with the trajectories of women’s LDL-cholesterol levels and blood pressure during the menopausal transition.
Marisa Medina, Professor
UC San Francisco
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
A subset of women experience an accelerated rise in certain cardiometabolic risk factors around the time of menopause, increasing their risk for heart disease and other conditions. We would like to discover why some women experience dramatic changes while others are relatively protected.
Qualifications: 1) The undergraduate would learn about human subjects research and be trained to protect human subjects before analyzing human subjects data.
2) Under direction of the research supervisor, the undergraduate would explore large, electronic health record-derived datasets, such as AllofUs and UKBiobank, that contain participants' longitudinal health data as well as genetic data and menopause status information. The undergraduate would extract useful information for quality control and analysis. An interest and some basic experience with statistics and coding would be a good foundation for this project, and it would be desired that the undergraduate has proficiency in at least one programming language. A motivated student with a desire to analyze datasets that are relevant to human (women's) health would be ideal.
3) Under direction of the research supervisor, the undergraduate would calculate the trajectories of cardiometabolic risk factors (such as LDL-cholesterol levels, blood pressure, or body composition) in relevant individuals over time and categorize the type of trajectory each individual experienced.
4) The undergraduate would then identify genetic variation or other factors that distinguish between individuals in different trajectory categories.
Hours: to be negotiated
Off-Campus Research Site: This is a data analysis project, so project can be conducted completely remotely. The Medina lab is physically located at 5700 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Oakland, but the research supervisor works remotely.
Related website: https://medinalab.ucsf.edu/
Related website: https://medinalab.ucsf.edu/