Professor Tuuli Lappalainen’s research group studies functional genetic variation in the human populations. We are particularly interested in characterizing how genetic variants affect the transcriptome, and how these cellular changes contribute to genetic risk for both common and rare diseases and traits. We analyze these questions both by computational integration analysis of large genomic and transcriptomic data sets and by experimental manipulation of human cell lines. While the majority of our work involves analysis of protected human data, we also analyze non-sensitive data sets such as those derived from cell lines and open repositories, and request these resources for the lab’s work.