Profile
Andrew (Andy) Dahl
Assistant Professor
Departments of Medicine and Human Genetics, and the College
Andrew (Andy) Dahl develops statistical methods to better understand the genetic basis of complex diseases. He focuses on genetic approaches to define and validate new disease subtypes, with the aim of making treatment more precise. Currently, he is developing tools to parse the functional genomic basis of metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and psychiatric diseases such as major depression.
His Subtype Lab, housed in the Section of Genetic Medicine, has a long-term goal of advancing precision treatment by identifying disease subtypes with distinct biological etiology, clinical presentation, and/or treatment responses, with special emphasis on asthma, psychiatry, and single-cell genomics. The lab’s subtyping methods build on basic tools from statistical genetics, functional genomics, and linear algebra. It also develops methods for gene-environment interaction, gene-gene interaction, pleiotropy, and confounder correction, which can be invaluable for characterizing subtypes.
Dahl earned a BA in economics, a BS in mathematics with honors, and an MS in statistics, all from the University of Chicago. He received his PhD in genomic medicine and statistics from Oxford University, where he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher in genetics at the University of California, San Francisco, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.