Bjarni Jóhann Vilhjálmsson

Dr. Vilhjálmsson is a Professor at the National Centre for Register-based Research and at the Bioinformatics Research Centre at Aarhus University. Vilhjalmsson is a statistical geneticist who is motivated to leverage large population-scale data to understand the interplay between genetic and environmental factors when determining the causes of disease. He currently leads a research group at Aarhus University that is focused on developing methods that integrate electronic health records and large genetic data to understand psychiatric disorders and other diseases.

He is the author of LDpred, one of the most cited methods and software for deriving Polygenic risk Scores (PRS). LDpred contributed significantly to the development of the entire PRS field, having been used in a number of PRS seminal papers that have highlighted the value of PRSs in clinical settings.

Dr. Vilhjálmsson completed his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from the University of Southern California in 2011 and went on to do postdoctoral research at Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, and later at the Bioinformatics Research Centre (BiRC) of Aarhus University. In 2016 Dr. Vilhjalmsson left academia to work as a software product owner at QIAGEN, but rejoined academia at Aarhus University to establish his own research group. Dr. Vilhjalmsson was awarded the prestigious Lundbeck Fellow grant in 2020.