I am a current graduate student (PhD candidate) in the Health Studies department at the University of Chicago.
I am a trainee of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) dual MD/PhD program with the Pritzker School of Medicine, also at the University of Chicago. I'm supposed to return to MS3 this year (2012). I think that hospital medicine is what I'll end up doing, but don't really know that.


Current work

My PhD will be in biostatistics, mostly statistical genetics.
I'm working on methods for phenotype association in resequencing studies. My focus has been on the interpretation of results from sequencing studies.

• How methods or hypotheses which look for larger effects among rare variants are related to hypotheses about the evolution of the phenotype.
• How observing more rare variants in cases in a case-control study does not imply that rare variants are on average disease promoting.
• How studies which follow up on SNPs discovered via sequencing in case-control studies can observe an exaggerated difference between rare and common SNPs.
• How models of the SNP-minor allele frequency relationship can be made robust in case-control studies.

• Estimate and test association models for quantitative traits using a random effects approach.
• Estimate and test association models for binary traits using MCMC.
• Estimate the distribution of minor allele frequencies in the source population of a case-control study.
• Use the above to get a corrected and stable estimate of the effect-frequency relationship in a case-control study.

• The Dallas Heart Study resequencing of several lipids-associated genes.
• A case-control resequencing of asthmatic individuals (I think the study name is EVE) provided by the Ober lab.
• Whole-genome sequencing of Mexican-American families as part of the T2D-GENES project.

• TDT-like mixed conditional logistic estimation for family datasets.
• Variational-Bayes techniques to make family-based association data as easy to estimate with as unrelateds.
• 3-level hierarchical GLMs to quantify the impact of SNP-features (like conservation score or eQTL effect) on association.
• Add those SNP-features which predict low MAF into my case-control correction.

• The MAF-spectrum and SNP-association techniques above make direct predictions about the power of replication studies. It would be nice to make a calculator.
• I think that one could avoid MCMC for getting point estimates in binary data by cleverly combining the Laplace approximation and pairwise pseudo-likelihood. The uncertainty estimates coming out would be kind of shady and need null-simulations (permutation or re-sampling) or a secondary simulation (an importance sampler or independence-chain Metropolis) to clean them up.
• I'd like to try multi-variate parameter expansion for smooth random effect models. As best I can tell that's low-hanging fruit.
• A modification that does lazy variable selection or fits a mixture of normals (or Dirichlet process) for the variance of SNP effects.
• Use a doubly-robust estimator for GWAS to reduce population structure threats.

My primary advisor is Dan Nicolae in the Department of Statistics; my committee chair is/was Paul Rathouz who recently left the Department of Health Studies for Biostatistics at UW-Madison. Jonathan Pritchard (Human Genetics) and Dzeng Huo (Health Studies) are also on my committee.
I previously did some applied work with Diane Lauderdale at the University of Chicago.
Before coming to Chicago, I worked with Boris Kovatchev at the University of Virginia on methods for continuous glucose sensors.

Current Publications

• King CR, Rathouz PJ, Nicolae DL, 2010 An Evolutionary Framework for Association Testing in Resequencing Studies. PLoS Genet 6(11): e1001202. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1001202 Supplementary Code.

• King CR, Knutson KL, Rathouz PJ, Sidney S, Liu, K, Lauderdale DS. Short sleep duration and incident coronary artery calcification. JAMA. 2008;300(24):2859–2866.
• Kovatchev, B.P. King C, Breton M, Anderson S, Clarke W. Clinical assessment and mathematical modeling of the accuracy of continuous glucose sensors (CGS). Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc 1, 71-4(2006).
• King CR, Anderson SM, Breton MD, Clarke WL, Kovatchev BP: Modeling of calibration effectiveness and blood-to-interstitial glucose dynamics as potential confounders of the accuracy of continuous glucose sensors during hyperinsulinemic clamp. J Diabetes Sci Technol 1:317–322, 2007