The Hall Lab

Dr. Tomas González Zarzar, Kristin Passero, Jiayan Zhou, and Dr. Molly Hall discuss Hall Lab research with USDA Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack during his visit to Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences.

Hall Lab PhD student Jiayan Zhou publishes new paper as co-first author in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Here we leveraged social media data from Twitter to anticipate vaccine hesitancy at the US county level.

Lingyao Li, Jiayan Zhou, Zihui Ma, Michelle T.Bens, Molly A.Hall, Gregory B.Baecher “Dynamic assessment of the COVID-19 vaccine acceptance leveraging social media data.” Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Hall Lab postdoc Dr. Tomás González Zarzar’s first-author paper has been published in Frontiers in Radiology. In this collaboration with Drs. Dokyoon Kim and Li Shen (UPenn), we evaluated sex differences in metabolomic effects on Alzheimer’s Disease.

González-Zarzar T, Lee B, Coughlin R, Kim D, Shen L, Hall MA “Sex Differences in the Metabolome of Alzheimer’s Disease Progression.” Frontiers in Radiology

CLARITE version 2 has been released. Full release notes are available in the documentation, but the main improvement is support for genotype data and simplification of the analysis functions to better support a variety of association and interaction tests.
Support for genotype data is possible though the use of Pandas-Genomics, another project of the Hall Lab.

The Hall Lab published a study in PLoS Genetics featuring the lab’s novel genetic encoding method: EDGE. Using EDGE, we identified a novel genetic interaction associated with age-related cataract that no other method identified. EDGE shows promise for identifying nonadditive genetic effects in biomedical data.

Hall, Molly A., et al. “Novel EDGE encoding method enhances ability to identify genetic interactions.” PLoS genetics 17.6 (2021): e1009534.

New publication from our collaboration with Dr. Jennie Noll (Human Development and Family Studies) on risk for obesity in women who have experienced sexual abuse:

Li J, Hall MA, Shalev I, Schreier H, González-Zarzar T, Marcovici I, Putnam F, Noll J. (2021) Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysregulation and risk for obesity in sexually abused females. Psychoneuroendocrinology: 129, 105254

Kristin Passero (Hall Lab PhD student) and Molly Hall organized the session “What about the environment? Leveraging multi-omic datasets to characterize the environment’s role in human health” for the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing with environmental health research experts Dr. Chirag Patel (Harvard Medical School), Dr. Arjun Manrai (Harvard Medical School), Dr. Kimberly McAllister (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), and Dr. Shefali Setia Verma (University of Pennsylvania).

Kristin published an introduction to the session and gave an introductory talk as well. Hall Lab MD/PhD student, Morris Aguilar, also gave a talk on his metabolomics research.