Department of Preventive Medicine Biostatistics Seminar Series: Integrating Genetic Ancestry, Environmental Exposure and Health Equity

The Division of Biostatistics of the Department of Preventive Medicine, UTHSC, invites you to attend the following seminar.

Time: Monday, March 09, 2026, 2:00PM - 3:00PM CT

Venue: Doctor's Office Building, 66 N Pauline Street, Conference Room 400

ZOOM Virtual Room Connection: Register in advance for this meeting to get the Zoom Link

Seminar Website: https://www.uthsc.edu/preventive-medicine/events.php

Speaker Bio: https://www.uthsc.edu/faculty/profile/?netid=vcolonna

Integrating Genetic Ancestry, Environmental Exposure and Health Equity

Vincenza Colonna, Ph.D.

Department of Genetics, Genomics & Informatics

University of Tennessee Health Science Center

The Biorepository and Integrative Genomics (BIG) Initiative links genomic, phenotypic, and environmental data from a diverse Mid-South population. This seminar presents two complementary studies from the BIG cohort of 13,152 individuals. The first study reveals remarkable genetic diversity: 50% of participants have non-European or admixed ancestry, and we identified over 770,000 novel variants with potential clinical relevance. We observed significant discrepancies between self-reported race and genetic ancestry-including closely related individuals self-identifying in different racial categories-highlighting limitations of race as a biomedical variable. The second study introduces a reference-free identity-by-descent (IBD) framework for population structure. Hierarchical community detection identified four major communities and seventeen subcommunities that capture fine-scale demographic structure. These IBD-defined communities strongly predict shared environmental exposures: the predominantly African-ancestry community (C2) experiences elevated PM2.5 exposure, higher social vulnerability, and increased respiratory and dermatological disease prevalence. IBD-based classification outperformed traditional ancestry categories in predicting pediatric asthma and dermatitis risk. Together, these findings demonstrate that IBD-based clustering jointly captures genetic and environmental determinants of health, offering a scalable framework for precision public health in diverse populations.