CREAL. Centre de Recerca en Epidemiologia Ambiental

Research Interests

He obtained his BSc (1997) in Biostatistics at Autonomous University of Barcelona. Then he got his MSc (2000) and PhD (2006) in Statistics at Technical University of Catalonia. He was working at the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) from 1997 until 2005 as a biostatistician. Since July 2005 he has been working at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) as a researcher at Xavier Estivill’s lab. In July 2007 he moved to the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) getting a research position in biostatistics. Since 2006 he's an associate professor of biostatistics at the Department of Public Health of University of Barcelona (UB).

Since he moved to CRG he was interested in descriptive epidemiology. In particular, he focused on analyzing cancer data: time trends, geographical distribution, prevalence and incidence predictions, and probability of developing cancer. He was also interested in describing new methods to analyze recurrent events data in cancer research. Currently his work focuses on genetic epidemiology. He's mainly interested in statistical methods to identify genetic causes of complex disorders. Joint with other colleagues, they have developed software for genotype and haplotype association analysis in genetic association studies. They also developed a model to predict mutations in deafness. He's also interested in methods for determining alterations in gene dosage (CNVs).

Statistical software development Web Page can be found here

Selected Publications

1. González JR, Subirana I, Escaramís G, Peraza S, Cáceres A, Estivill X, Armengol L. Accounting for uncertainty when assessing association between copy number and disease: a latent class model. BMC Bioinformatics, 2009;10:172.
2. Armengol L, Villatoro S, González JR, Pantano L, García-Aragonés M, Rabionet R, Cáceres M, Estivill X. Identification of copy number variants defining genomic differences among major human groups. PLoS One, 2009;30;4(9):e7230.
3. González JR, Carrasco JL, Armengol L, Villatoro S, Jover L, Yasui Y, Estivill X. Probe-specific mixed-model approach to detect copy number differences using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA). BMC Bioinformatics, 2008;9:261
4. González JR, Carrasco JL, Dudbridge F, Armengol L, Estivill X, Moreno V. Maximizing association statistics over genetic models. Genet Epidemiol, 2008;32:246-54.
5. Gonzalez JR, Armengol L, Solé X, Guino E, Mercader JM, Estivill X, Moreno V.  SNPassoc: an R package to perform whole genome association studies. Bioinformatics, 2007;23(5):644-5