Profile
Dr. Balliu is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Computational Medicine at UCLA. She obtained a BSc. in Statistics from the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece and a Ph.D. in Statistical Genetics from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She did her postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Stephen Montgomery, focusing on methods to understand the role of inherited variation on molecular and complex traits. She joined UCLA in 2018 as an Independent Fellow in the Department of Computational Medicine and later as a faculty in the Departments of Pathology and Computational Medicine. Dr. Balliu was the recipient of the Charles J. Epstein Postdoctoral Award for Excellence in Human Genetics Research from ASHG and
Dr. Balliu’s research interests focus on the development of novel statistical methodologies and computational tools for analyzing sparsely and irregularly sampled high-dimensional functional data such as those arising from high-throughput genomic assays, mobile phone sensors, and electronic health records. She applies these methods to understand the genetic, molecular, cellular, and environmental mechanisms underlying complex human traits and diseases. Dr. Balliu is especially interested in understanding how context-specific genetic regulation relates to metabolic and psychiatric phenotypes.
Dr. Balliu recently received a five-year grant from NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute as part of its newly established Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) Consortium. Read more here: UCLA researchers awarded $4.7M NIH grant to study how genomic variation influences stem cell reprogramming