Prof. Marcelo Nóbrega serves as chair of the UChicago Committee on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology. His research aims to understand the mechanisms by which genetic variation in noncoding sequences increases the risk of human diseases. These mutations presumably affect regulatory switches that control the function of genes, resulting in increased risk to a host of common human diseases such as congenital heart defects, heart failure, cancer, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, asthma and preterm birth–all of which have been modeled in the Nóbrega lab.
His goal is to use the same suite of tools and approaches developed over the past decade in his lab to tackle the challenges of developing predictive disease risk scores based on noncoding mutations in the human genome.
His AAAS recognition cites “pioneering contributions to characterizing the function of regulatory genetic variation contributing to human disease.”
Read the full story "Nine University of Chicago scholars named 2021 AAAS fellows" published January 26, 2022