I am a statistical geneticist researching the mapping of complex genetic traits including such traits as familial, but their inheritance patterns appear to differ from simple Mendelian inheritance due to incomplete penetrance, sporadic cases, genetic heterogeneity, epistasis and gene-environment interactions. Thus, the magnitude of the genetic effect may be modest or masked by the complexity of the etiologic mechanism. My ultimate goal of this research is to assist in the isolation and cloning of disease-predisposing genes for the prevention and treatment of the disease.