Faculty

Burcu Darst

Affiliate Assistant Professor, Epidemiology

206-667-1036

Education

PhD Epidemiology, University of Wisconsin (Madison), 2018
BS Cognitive Science, University of California (San Diego), 2009

Contact

206-667-1036

Office M4-B873
1100 Fairview Ave N
Seattle, WA 98109
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Bio

Dr. Burcu Darst’s is a genetic epidemiologist with research focused on identifying and understanding genetic and multi-omic risk factors of complex diseases in diverse populations, particularly how they relate to health disparities. Her research lies predominantly in studying prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, with the underlying goal of identifying risk factors that could prevent the onset and health disparities of these diseases. Dr. Darst’s research is based on a variety of approaches, including using rare genetic variants captured with genomic sequencing, genome-wide association studies, polygenic risk scores, and metabolomics to understand disease risk. Currently, she is leading an effort to improve understanding of the genomic and metabolic mechanisms contributing to prostate cancer risk in men from diverse populations as well as improving the utility of polygenic risk scores and rare genetic variants for the prediction of prostate cancer across multi-ancestry patient populations.This research is conducted in collaboration with large-scale international collaborations investigating genetic risk of prostate cancer.

Research Interests

Prostate cancer prevention, Health disparities, Genetic risk factors, Molecular biomarkers, Multi-omic integration

Recent Publications (PubMed)

Identification of proteins associated with type 2 diabetes risk in diverse racial and ethnic populations.
(2024 Sep 30)
Diabetologia
Liu S, Zhu J, Zhong H, Wu C, Xue H, Darst BF, Guo X, Durda P, Tracy RP, Liu Y, Johnson WC, Taylor KD, Manichaikul AW, Goodarzi MO, Gerszten RE, Clish CB, Chen YI, Highland H, Haiman CA, Gignoux CR, Lange L, Conti DV, Raffield LM, Wilkens L, Marchand LL, North KE, Young KL, Loos RJ, Buyske S, Matise T, Peters U, Kooperberg C, Reiner AP, Yu B, Boerwinkle E, Sun Q, Rooney MR, Echouffo-Tcheugui JB, Daviglus ML, Qi Q, Mancuso N, Li C, Deng Y, Manning A, Meigs JB, Rich SS, Rotter JI, Wu L

An extension of latent unknown clustering integrating multi-omics data (LUCID) incorporating incomplete omics data.
(2024)
Bioinform Adv 4(1): vbae123
Zhao Y, Jia Q, Goodrich J, Darst B, Conti DV

Hierarchical joint analysis of marginal summary statistics-Part II: High-dimensional instrumental analysis of omics data.
(2024 Oct)
Genet Epidemiol 48(7): 291-309
Jiang L, Shen J, Darst BF, Haiman CA, Mancuso N, Conti DV

Biobank-wide association scan identifies risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer's disease and endophenotypes.
(2024 May 24)
Elife 12():
Yan D, Hu B, Darst BF, Mukherjee S, Kunkle BW, Deming Y, Dumitrescu L, Wang Y, Naj A, Kuzma A, Zhao Y, Kang H, Johnson SC, Carlos C, Hohman TJ, Crane PK, Engelman CD, Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC), Lu Q

Identification of Genes with Rare Loss of Function Variants Associated with Aggressive Prostate Cancer and Survival.
(2024 Apr)
Eur Urol Oncol 7(2): 248-257
Saunders EJ, Dadaev T, Brook MN, Wakerell S, Govindasami K, Rageevakumar R, Hussain N, Osborne A, Keating D, Lophatananon A, Muir KR, UKGPCS Collaborators, Darst BF, Conti DV, Haiman CA, Antoniou AC, Eeles RA, Kote-Jarai Z

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