Jacob M. Keaton, PhD

Research Interests

My theoretical and methodological research addresses the analytical challenges of understanding the genomic architecture of complex human diseases and traits, while my applied research extends this to discover the genes and genomic mechanisms driving disease in specific populations. The majority of my work has been centered on cardiometabolic and renal disease in African Americans, a classically underserved population that is overburdened with disease.

My future goals as a researcher include mining electronic medical record databases, such as the eMERGE network at Vanderbilt, to detect unique genotype-phenotype relationships and leveraging my genomic findings by developing statistical and computational methods for high-throughput omics (i.e. transcriptomics, metabolomics, etc.) data integration to identify targets for downstream molecular, cellular, and organismal-level functional investigations of candidate disease loci.

Keywords and Content Areas

genetic epidemiology, genomics, statistical genetics, cardiometabolic, epistasis, health disparities