Daniel W. Belsky

CoxMDS identifies causal mediators in DNA methylation studies with survival outcomes, maintaining FDR control and higher power than existing methods.

The paper develops Biolearn, an open-source framework for curating and evaluating aging biomarkers across datasets, finding that harmonization and standardization improve their performance and generalizability.

This paper introduces a framework for quantifying uncertainty in polygenic risk scores, showing that prediction intervals vary with genetic and environmental factors.

This study examines differences between Infinium MethylationEPIC v1 and v2, showing high array-level concordance but probe-level variation, and recommends accounting for version differences in analyses.

The paper presents a genomic data resource from a caloric restriction trial, including SNP genotypes and multi-omic longitudinal data from multiple tissues.

This paper shows that GDF15 levels rise with psychosocial stress, depression, anxiety, and biological aging, and that saliva GDF15 has a distinct diurnal pattern and responds rapidly to acute stress.

The paper describes the Gene-SOEP dataset, a longitudinal genetic study of 2,598 individuals in Germany, providing polygenic indices for research on genetic-environment interactions.

This study finds that maternal childhood adversity is linked to accelerated epigenetic aging in male newborns but not females, using multiple epigenetic clocks.

The paper develops DNAmFitAge, a biological age indicator that integrates physical fitness metrics with epigenetic clocks to assess aging and health risks.

The paper tests if socioeconomic gradients observed in blood DNA methylation measures can be reproduced using buccal-cell DNA, finding smaller effect sizes and lower cross-tissue correlations.

This study analyzes DNA methylation changes in humans undergoing calorie restriction, finding CR-induced DNAm changes opposite BMI and smoking associations and aligned with aging-related CpG sites.

The paper constructs polygenic indexes for 47 phenotypes across 11 datasets and provides a tool to correct errors-in-variables bias when using PGIs as proxies for the additive SNP factor.

This study identifies 157 genome-wide significant loci associated with non-cognitive contributions to educational attainment, explaining 57% of genetic variance.

The paper evaluates the DunedinPoAm DNA methylation measure of aging pace in children and finds socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with faster aging, unlike other epigenetic clocks.

The paper develops a DNA methylation-based blood test, DunedinPoAm, to quantify individual differences in the pace of biological aging and validates its association with aging-related outcomes across multiple studies.

The paper uses polygenic scores to show that students from advantaged schools are more likely to take advanced math courses and persist in math, while disadvantaged schools track fewer high-potential students into advanced math.

This study shows that older brain-age in midlife is linked to accelerated biological aging and cognitive decline, supporting brain-age as a biomarker while highlighting its potential to reflect lifelong CNS variation.

This study examines how maternal and child genetic data relate to parenting and children's educational attainment, finding genetic and environmental interactions.

This study tests whether facial aging can serve as a surrogate for biological age in training epigenetic age predictors, finding it provides an independent measure of biological aging.

The paper links neighborhood data with genetic and social outcomes to assess whether neighborhood effects on health and behavior are due to selection or causation.

The paper finds that a polygenic score for educational attainment is associated with larger brain size and better cognitive test performance, suggesting a genetic link between brain size and intelligence.

The paper examines whether genetic confounding explains the link between father absence and accelerated reproductive development in young women, finding limited support for the hypothesis.

The paper examines genetic similarities between friends and schoolmates using longitudinal health data, finding that social forces contribute to genetic correlation rather than individual selection.

This study uses polygenic scores to examine if genetic factors buffer against depressive symptoms after spouse death in older adults, finding small protective effects.