Manuel Rivas

Manuel Rivas, DPhil, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine 

Research Description: Rivas lab is dedicated to develop statistical and computational tools dedicated to the analysis of large population biobanks. Recently they have built updated disease risk prediction models from human genetic data, commonly referred to as polygenic risk score models, for type 2 diabetes that integrate information from related biomarkers. Furthermore, they pinpointed rare strong effect variants that have an effect on glycaemic traits. Rivas continues work in type 2 diabetes by focusing on the exome wide analysis of more than 200,000 exomes in UK Biobank integrated with metabolomics data from a collaboration with Nightingale and plans to extend that with proteomics and imaging data of the pancreas.

Selected relevant publications (SDRC Members in BOLD): 

  1. Sinnott-Armstrong N, Tanigawa Y, Amar D, Mars N, Benner C, Aguirre M, Venkataraman GR, Wainberg M, Ollila HM, Kiiskinen T, Havulinna AS, Pirruccello JP, Qian J, Shcherbina A; FinnGen, Rodriguez F, Assimes TL, Agarwala V, Tibshirani R, Hastie T, Ripatti S, Pritchard JK, Daly MJ, Rivas MA. Genetics of 35 blood and urine biomarkers in the UK Biobank. Nat Genet. 2021 Feb;53(2):185-194. doi: 10.1038/s41588-020-00757-z. PMID: 33462484; PMCID: PMC7867639. 

  2. Amar D, Sinnott-Armstrong N, Ashley EA, Rivas MA. Graphical analysis for phenome-wide causal discovery in genotyped population-scale biobanks. Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 13;12(1):350. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20516-2. PMID: 33441555; PMCID: PMC7806647. 

  3. Tanigawa Y, Li J, Justesen JM, Horn H, Aguirre M, DeBoever C, Chang C, Narasimhan B, Lage K, Hastie T, Park CY, Bejerano G, Ingelsson E, Rivas MA. Components of genetic associations across 2,138 phenotypes in the UK Biobank highlight adipocyte biology. Nat Commun. 2019 Sep 6;10(1):4064. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11953-9. PMID: 31492854; PMCID: PMC6731283.