Janet Sinsheimer

Professor

5357C Gonda


In Memoriam.

“Janet had been part of the UCLA Health Sciences community for over 35 years. Janet was an active professor in three UCLA Health Sciences Departments: Biostatistics, Computational Medicine, and Human Genetics. [Additionally, she was a joint faculty member in ISG and one of the original faculty advisory committee members for the Institute, then called the Center for Society & Genetics.] In the past, she also held an appointment in the UCLA Dept of Psychology. She published over 200 research articles, with over 13,000 citations, in statistical genetics (including outstanding work in gene mapping, gene interaction, epigenetic and microbiome analysis), Bayesian methods for phylogenetics, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

After starting out for a few years working as a chemist at Hoffmann-La Roche, Janet returned to academia. She received her PhD from the UCLA Department of Biomathematics in 1994 under Drs. Lake and Little. She has been faculty at UCLA almost continuously since then, including Chair of the Dept of Biomathematics (now named Computational Medicine) during 2013-2017.

Janet was also a dedicated educator. She mentored 14 students to their PhDs, including 10 women, most of whom are now professors themselves, including some at UCLA: Mary Sehl, Marc Suchard, and Jin Zhou. In addition, she was an extremely popular statistical collaborator and consultant on projects across our campus, and worldwide; she was sought after by both professors and students, who could rely on her judgment and empathy.

Janet was repeatedly recognized for her work. She was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Linnean Society of London. In 2017, she was awarded the L. Adrienne Cupples Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in Biostatistics.”

[text released by the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine]

 

Selected Publications:

2018. Gilbert PS, Wu J, Simon MW, Sinsheimer JS, Alfaro ME. Filtering nucleotide sites by phylogenetic signal to noise ratio increases confidence in the Neoaves phylogeny generated from ultraconserved elements. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2018;126:116-128. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2018.03.033 PMCID: PMC5515700

2018. Pan DZ, Garske KM, Alvarez M, Bhagat YV, Boocock J, Nikkola E, Miao Z, Raulerson CK, Cantor RM, Civelek M, Glastonbury CA, Small KS, Boehnke M, Lusis AJ, Sinsheimer JS, Mohlke KL, Laakso M, Pajukanta P, Ko A. Integration of human adipocyte chromosomal interactions with adipose gene expression prioritizes obesity-related genes from GWAS. Nat Commun. 2018; 9:1512. PMC5904163

2017. Clark MM, Chazara O, Sobel EM, Gjessing HK, Magnus P, Moffett A, Sinsheimer JS. Human Birth Weight and Reproductive Immunology: Testing for Interactions between Maternal and Offspring KIR and HLA-C Genes. Hum Hered. 2017;81(4):181-193 PMCID: PMC4715557

2017. Lorenzo Bermejo J, Boekstegers F, González Silos R, Marcelain K, Baez Benavides P, Barahona Ponce C, Müller B, Ferreccio C, Koshiol J, Fischer C, Peil B, Sinsheimer J, Fuentes Guajardo M, Barajas O, Gonzalez-Jose R, Bedoya G, Cátira Bortolini M, Canizales-Quinteros S, Gallo C, Ruiz Linares A, Rothhammer F. Subtypes of Native American ancestry and leading causes of death: Mapuche ancestry-specific associations with gallbladder cancer risk in Chile. PLoS Genet. 2017 May 25;13(5):e1006756. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006756 PMCID: PMC5444600

2017. Cybis GB, Sinsheimer JS, Bedford T, Rambaut A, Lemey P, Suchard MA. Bayesian nonparametric clustering in phylogenetics: modeling antigenic evolution in influenza. Stat Med. 2017 Jan 18. doi: 10.1002/sim.7196. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 28098392 [PubMed in Process]

2017. vonHoldt BM, Shuldiner E, Koch IJ, Kartzinel RY, Hogan A, Brubaker L, Wanser S, Stahler D, Wynne CDL, Ostrander EA, Sinsheimer JS, Udell MAR. Structural variants in genes associated with human Williams-Beuren syndrome underlie stereotypical hypersociability in domestic dogs. Sci Adv. 2017; 3:e1700398. PMCID: PMC5517105

2016. Levine AJ, Soontornniyomkij V, Achim CL, Masliah E, Gelman BB, Sinsheimer JS, Singer EJ, Moore DJ. Multilevel analysis of neuropathogenesis of neurocognitive impairment in HIV.  J Neurovirol. 2016 Aug;22(4):431-41. doi: 10.1007/s13365-015-0410-7. PMCID: PMC4893344

2016. Janowitz Koch I, Clark MM, Thompson MJ, Deere-Machemer KA, Wang J, Duarte L, Gnanadesikan GE, McCoy EL, Rubbi L, Stahler DR, Pellegrini M, Ostrander EA, Wayne RK, Sinsheimer JS, vonHoldt BM. The concerted impact of domestication and transposon insertions on methylation patterns between dogs and grey wolves. Mol Ecol. 2016;25:1838-55  PMCID: PMC4849173

2016. Clark MM, Blangero J, Dyer TD, Sobel EM, Sinsheimer JS. The Quantitative-MFG Test: A Linear Mixed Effect Model to Detect Maternal-Offspring Gene Interactions. Ann Hum Genet. 2016;80:63-80 PMCID: PMC4715557

2015. Gilbert PS, Chang J, Pan C, Sobel EM, Sinsheimer JS, Faircloth BC, Alfaro ME. Genome-wide ultraconserved elements exhibit higher phylogenetic informativeness than traditional gene markers in percomorph fishes. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2015;92:140-6. PMCID: PMC4583375

2015. Rickabaugh TM, Baxter RM, Sehl M, Sinsheimer JS, Hultin PM, Hultin LE, Quach A, Martínez-Maza O, Horvath S, Vilain E, Jamieson BD. Acceleration of Age-Associated Methylation Patterns in HIV-1-Infected Adults. PLoS One. 2015;10:e0119201 PMCID: PMC4373843

2015. Han E, Sinsheimer JS, Novembre J. Fast and accurate site frequency spectrum estimation from low coverage sequence data. Bioinformatics. 2015;31:720-7 PMCID: PMC 4341071Lake JA, Larsen J, Sarna B, de la Haba RR, Pu Y, Koo H, Zhao J, Sinsheimer JS. Rings Reconcile Genotypic and Phenotypic Evolution within the Proteobacteria. Genome Biol Evol. 2015;7:3434-42 PMCID: PMC4700952

2014. Lange K, Papp JC, Sinsheimer JS, Sobel EM. Next Generation Statistical Genetics: Modeling, Penalization, and Optimization in High-Dimensional Data. Annu Rev Stat Appl. 2014;1:279-300 PMCID: PMC4062304

2014. Han E, Sinsheimer JS, Novembre J. Characterizing bias in population genetic inferences from low-coverage sequencing data. Mol Biol Evol. 2014;31:723-35. PMCID: PMC 3935184

2011. Childs EJ, Sobel EM, Palmer CG, Sinsheimer JS. Detection of intergenerational genetic effects with application to HLA-B matching as a risk factor for schizophrenia. Hum Hered. 2011;72:161-72. PMCID: PMC 3721948