Wei Zhao is Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR). She was trained in Psychology (Ph.D) and Statistics (M.A.) at the University of Michigan, and was a research faculty at the School of Public Health prior to joining ISR. She is a genetic epidemiologist with more than 10 years of experience doing genetic association studies in large epidemiological cohorts. Her research aims to identify genetic risk factors leading to human complex diseases/traits. She applys advanced high-dimensional statistical models and methods to investigate the relationship between multi-omics (genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics), social/environmental factor, and complex human diseases/traits in multi-ancestry populations. She has studied a variety of disease outcomes and health behaviors with a recent focus on cognition, dementia and mental health related traits.