Harold Snieder - Biography#

Harold Snieder is a genetic epidemiologist specialized in cardiometabolic and renal disease. Since 1 November 2006 he heads the Unit of Genetic Epidemiology and Bioinformatics within the Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). He has an MSc in exercise physiology and psychology from the Vrije Universiteit (Free University), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His PhD project ‘Genetic epidemiology of risk factors of cardiovascular disease. A study of middle-aged twins’ was supervised by Lorenz van Doornen (psychophysiology) and Dorret Boomsma (behavior genetics) at the same university and completed in 1996. In that same year he moved to London, UK where he joined the TwinsUK registry (St. Thomas’ Hospital, King’s College London, UK) studying the genetic epidemiology of common complex traits using linkage and association approaches with a main focus on cardiovascular disease. In October 2000 he moved to the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia where he joined the Georgia Prevention Institute to study genetic risk factors in interaction with behavioral and environmental antecedents of cardiovascular disease in youth. He was awarded tenure on the 1st of July 2005 and received a joint appointment at the department of Biostatistics on December 1, 2005. His work has been funded by the British and American Heart Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institute of Health and the European Union. He has published more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is a regular reviewer for funding agencies such as NIH and NWO and for journals such as Circulation, Hypertension, Diabetes and Psychosomatic Medicine.

I am a renowned expert in design and analysis of genetic epidemiological studies of common complex diseases and I coordinate the genetic studies in the LifeLines Cohort Study. My group has extensive expertise in quality control and statistical analysis of genome-wide association study (GWAS) data and in using and producing freely available software modules developed for the R programming language (http://cran.r-project.org) on quality control (QCGWAS, GWASinspector, QCEWAS) and statistical analysis (lodGWAS, MetaSubtract) of (epi)genome-wide association study data. We were the first to publish epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) of obesity (in 2010) and hypertension (in 2012). I have been (co)leading (epi)genome-wide association studies (EWAS/GWAS) on blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory markers, birth weight and depression, while also participating in numerous other EWAS/GWAS consortia with the Lifelines, Trails, NESDA and GECKO cohorts. Together with Eco de Geus, since 2014 I have been leading the international VgHRV consortium on heart rate variability that has members in 34 research institutes from 11 countries (Nolte et al. Nature Communications 2017). I am a member of the steering committee of the International Consortium of Blood Pressure GWAS (ICBP) since March 2012.