The Willer Lab at the University of Michigan is part of the Departments of Internal Medicine, Human Genetics, and Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics.

Our group focuses on the analysis of high-throughput genetic data to understand the biological basis of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. We have identified several hundred new genetic regions associated with lipid levels and obesity using whole-genome association studies and are now moving towards fine-mapping these loci to identify functional genetic variants. We are also performing state-of-the-art whole exome and whole genome sequencing studies to identify rare genetic variants with potentially large effects on disease risk.

We are primarily a computational lab but we also collaborate with experimental laboratories to perform exciting follow-up experiments in animal models and human induced pluripotent stem cells.