What have we learnt about the relationship between social outcomes such as education and income and genetics? And how can genetics help answer fundamental social and economic questions? What should economists be learning from genetic science – and what should geneticists learn from social science? The last decade has seen an explosion in research using genetic information from large studies of volunteers, many of which have been recruited in Bristol (Children of the 90’s and the UK Biobank). These studies, combined with many other from around the world, are transforming our understanding of how our genomes affect outcomes across life.

With Fleur Meddens (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), George Davey Smith (University of Bristol) and chair Neil Davies (University of Bristol).

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Neil Davies is an epidemiologist with a background in economics whose current research is focused on the links between education and health. It’s been widely established that people who remain in school and education for longer are healthier in lots of ways, and less healthy in others. For example, on average people with degrees live longer than those without, but they are also more likely to be short sighted. However, the causes of these differences are not well understood. In particular, whether these differences are caused by education, or merely reflect other differences between people. His research has used recent developments in genetics to provide new evidence about the relationship between education and health.

Fleur Meddens is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Health Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and at the department of Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She currently studies how genetic risks and endowments interact with quasi-experimental environmental factors to generate socioeconomic inequalities. She has a particular interest in lifestyle and obesity, mental health and wellbeing, and gender inequalities. As a collaborator of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), she was the lead author of a large-scale genome-wide association study (GWAS) on dietary intake, and a co-author of GWAS on education, wellbeing, and risk preferences. With the SSGAC, she is currently undertaking a large-scale GWAS of physical activity.

George Davey Smith is a clinical epidemiologist who has focused on methods for improving causal inference in studies of disease aetiology and disease prevention.  His work has involved early implementation of “negative controls” in epidemiological studies, the use of cross-context comparisons, sensitivity analyses, unobtrusive data collection methods and randomized trials in thought-to-be difficult situations.  He pioneered the use of germline genetic variants for investigating modifiable causes of disease (“Mendelian randomization”), developed several extensions of the basic method, and contributed to the application in many settings. He is an advocate of the pre-specified application of a range of methods, with different structures of potential biases, to the same question (“triangulation”), as the key approach to strengthening causal inference.  Throughout his career he has promoted increasing the accessibility of data, and implemented this in studies he has led, including the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and their Children (ALSPAC).