The proposed project explores how researchers in the new and growing arena of gene- environment interaction (GxE) research operationalize the concept of "a human population." The proposed project will add critical information about how traditional epidemiologists and genetic epidemiologists, using different kinds of data, work together to operationalize groups in their biomedical studies of disease.

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) requests financial support to partially defray speaker and participant travel expenses for an "Ancestry Inference Roundtable" to be held in May, 2012, in Chicago, IL. This meeting will build on an earlier ASHG position statement (ASHG, 2008) and the recommendations of an ASHG ancestry task force, which were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics (Royal et al., 2010).

Harvesting the benefits of genomics requires a new kind of transdisciplinary cooperation. Over the next three years, we will create the Center for Transdisciplinary ELSI Research in Translational Genomics (CT2G) to address key ELSI questions in translational research. The proposed Center brings together the unique resources of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), including its Division of Research, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), including the Hastings College of the Law Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. The Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) was recently launched by the NIH to accelerate the pace of discovery. Though initially focused on cancer, the PMI will eventually generate knowledge applicable to a range of diseases, including infectious diseases.