FINDME: Finding the missing environmentality

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Background

The FINDME project aims to use social sciences alongside genetics to investigate to what extent our social and genetic data can explain individual differences.

The project uses information from the Millennium Cohort Study.

Research details

Project title	FINDME: Finding the missing environmentality
Principal investigator	Felix Tropf, Centre for Longitudinal Studies and Purdue University
Themes	Inequality Education Fertility Depression Statistical learning Genetics Social science
Dates	October 2023 – October 2028
Funder	UKRI: find out more on the UKRI project page.
Summary	Evaluating the degree to which statistical models can explain or predict social outcomes such as educational attainment, fertility or wellbeing can contribute to advances in theory and scientific discovery, and help to understand how a society endures change and stress. However, this research can rely on methodology which can exclude non-social factors such as genes. Quantitative geneticists have developed a methodology to tackle this challenge, which brings together inference statistical models and measured genes. This has been used to explain 70 per cent of individual differences in height, for example. The FINDME project combines social sciences with knowledge from genetic methods to build on this work. It will: separate genetic from social factors and take gene-environment interaction into account provide interpretable statistical model specifications compare societies and evaluate the stability of sociological explanations quantify the relative contributions of social and non-social domains to individual differences. FINDME uses data from the Millennium Cohort Study as it combines extensive social and environmental research data with molecular genetics data.

Researchers

Felix Tropf Associate Professor of Sociology, Purdue University, and in Population Data Science at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Email: f.tropf@ucl.ac.uk

Felix is Associate Professor in Sociology at Purdue University and in Population Data Science at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a supervisor in the European Social Science Genetics Network.

His research focuses on topics in social demography, quantitative genetics, and data science.

Rafael Geurgas Postdoctoral researcher

Rafael is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University in the sociology department. He is interested in behavioural genetics, sociogenomics and heritability.

Laura Sheppard Research Fellow

Full UCL profile

Email: Laura.sheppard@ucl.ac.uk

Laura is a postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Dr Felix Tropf on the FINDME project on missing heritability. Her specific role examines environmental and genetic factors that predict inequalities in educational attainment. She joined CLS in April 2024. Her general research interests involve using quantitative methods to examine social inequalities such as UK food bank use and gendered dynamics within higher education. Laura has a BSc in Geography and an MRes in Advanced Quantitative Methods from the University of Bristol. Laura completed her PhD in 2024 at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL. Her PhD focused on gender and higher education inequalities using data science and quantitative geography.

Katherine Thompson Postdoctoral researcher

Katherine is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at Purdue University.

Saul Justin Newman Senior Research Fellow

Email: saul.newman@ucl.ac.uk

Saul is a Senior Research Fellow working with Professor Felix Tropf. He is working on diverse projects at CLS, researching sociogenomics and machine learning. Saul obtained a PhD in medical science, before working on plant science and genomics, remote sensing, and AI in the Australian government and the Australian National University, then moving to demography at Oxford.