PhD in reproductive genetics

The PhD education in Medical Science comprises carrying out a scientific project and completing at least 30 credits of courses at third-cycle level. The doctoral student must also write a scientific compilation thesis or monograph corresponding to at least 120 credits. For more information about third-cycle studies at Sahlgrenska Academy, see https://www.gu.se/en/sahlgrenska-akademin/doctoral-studies Doctoral studies comprises four years of full-time study, and leads to a doctoral degree. As part of your employment as a doctoral student, you may have departmental duties corresponding to up to 20 % of full-time employment, distributed throughout your study period, and result in a corresponding extension of the studies. Departmental duties usually consist of teaching at first- and second-cycle levels, but may also include research and administration. Project description: Pregnancy loss is the most common pregnancy complication, affecting approximately 1 in 7 clinically recognized pregnancies. Around half of pregnancy losses involve fetal chromosomal abnormalities, particularly aneuploidies, while the causes of the other half are usualy unknown. This PhD project aims to improve our understanding of the genetic mechanisms underlying pregnancy loss by developing computational approaches that may contribute to improved molecular diagnostics. The doctoral student will investigate the contribution of rare and common fetal genetic variants to pregnancy loss and how their effects differ between pregnancies with and without aneuploidies. The project will also develop scalable computational methods for detecting whole-chromosome and segmental aneuploidies using genotype-array and whole-genome sequencing data. The project uses large-scale genetic datasets from pregnancy losses and population-based cohorts and will be conducted in a collaborative, international research environment at the Wallenberg Laboratory, Sahlgrenska Academy.