Ye Lab @ UGA News

Michael successfully defended his PhD

Michael successfully defended his PhD dissertation on November 17th, 2022. Congratulations, Dr. Francis!



Michael joined UGA in 2017 as a graduate student in Nutrition. During the two years that he obtained a master's degree in Nutrition, Michael took classes in bioinformatics and genetics and developed a strong interest in Nutritional Genetics. In June 2019, Michael joined the Bioinformatics PhD program and joined the Ye lab. Michael's research focused on gene-diet interactions in large population cohorts. His dissertation title is: Nutrigenetics of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Vegetarianism. The three major chapters of his dissertation have been published or released as preprints:

1. Francis M, Li C, Sun Y, Zhou J, Li X, Brenna JT, Ye K. Genome-wide association study of fish oil supplementation on lipid traits in 81,246 individuals reveals new gene-diet interaction loci. PLOS Genetics. (2021)
2. Francis M, Sun Y, Xu H, Brenna JT, Ye K. Fifty-one novel, replicated loci identified in genome-wide association study of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids in 124,024 European individuals. (Submitted, medRxiv)
3. Francis M, Ye K. Gene-vegetarianism interactions detected in genome-wide analyses across 30 serum biomarkers. (Submitted, medRxiv)

In addition to these three major first-author papers, Michael published three first-author papers from his master and was a co-author on two other publications from the Ye lab (Google Scholar). He will be on a few more manuscripts to come.

Congratulations, Dr. Michael Francis.