Behrooz Z. Alizadeh (h-index: 30) is an expert Genetic Epidemiologist who has received his MD from the Teheran University of Medical Sciences (1997), his MSc from the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences, Rotterdam (2001), and his PhD from Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam (2005) in Genetic Epidemiology. He is a tenured associated professor at Dept. of Epidemiology, and holds the chair of the Unit of Digestive and Immune System Diseases, and is also a consultant for genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics to several (inter)national research groups and projects. Besides teaching Genetic and Epidemiology to medical students and postgraduate fellows, and supervising PhD students that are embedded in the Graduate School GUIDE, Dr Alizadeh is actively involved in collection of case-control samples in (auto) immune disorders. Research Interests: Dr Alizadeh is interested in genetic components of complex diseases, and “multi-morbidity” with a focus on inflammatory associated diseases. He uses synchronised studies on the effect modification of common and disease specific risk (genetic, and environmental) factors over several complex disorders, which include (auto) immune diseases (such as type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, rheumatoid arthritis), schizophrenia, hemochromatosis, osteoarthritis, cancer (of stomach) and liver diseases. His research focus is to identify the pathogenic genetic pathways to multi-factorial diseases, translate the findings to clinical and public health practice by using linkage, or association approaches, QTL analysis for endophenotypes and traits, statistical modelling, and bioinformatics tools. His research projects are embedded within a number of epidemiological population-based and clinical epidemiological cohort studies including the Lifelines Cohort Study embedded within in the UMCG, and in collaboration with internationally established scientific groups in the Middle East, Europe and the US. He works in close collaboration with the department of Genetics at UMCG that has several interconnected labs which are fully equipped with the state of-the-art technologies of ultra-deep sequencing, large scale SNP genotyping facilities, and various array-based techniques for genetic and genomic research. An integrated biological and clinical database of patient together with genetic information is being compiled.
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Relevant peer-reviewed publications:
1. Liu JZ, van Sommeren S,…, Alizadeh BZ, Parkes M, Thelma BK, Daly MJ, Kubo M , Anderson CA, Weersma RK. Association study discovers 38 susceptibility loci for inflammatory bowel disease and shows pervasive sharing of genetic risk across diverse populations.Nature Genetics March 2015. In press
2. Vaez A, Jansen R, Prins BP, Hottenga JJ, de Geus EJC, Boomsma DI,Penninx BWJH, Nolte IM, Snieder H, Alizadeh BZ. An in silico Post-GWAS Analysis of C-Reactive Protein Loci Suggests an Important Role for Interferons. CIRCCVG, Feb 2015. In press
3. Abbasi A, Deetman PE, Corpeleijn E, Gansevoort RT, Gans RO, Hillege HL, van der Harst P, Stolk RP, Navis G, Alizadeh BZ, Bakker SJ. Bilirubin as a potential causal factor in type 2 diabetes risk: a Mendelian randomization study. Diabetes. 2014, Nov 3. pii: DB_140228.
4. Perry JR, Day F, Elks CE,…, Alizadeh BZ, …, Widen E, Zygmunt M, Murray A, Easton DF, Stefansson K, Murabito JM, Ong KK. Parent-of-origin-specific allelic associations among 106 genomic loci for age at menarche. Nature. 2014 Oct 2; 514(7520): 92-7.
5. Van der Most PJ, Vaez A, Prins BP, Munoz ML, Snieder H, Alizadeh BZ, Nolte IM. QCGWAS: A flexible R package for automated quality control of genome-wide association results. Bioinformatics. 2014, Jan 13.