Welcome to the Social-Science Genetics Seminars (SSGS) at USC's Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) and the department of Economics at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. The SSGS provides an informal setting to discuss relevant papers in social-science genetics (typically presented by an author or sometimes reviewed by a club member). We are entirely based online, using Zoom as our platform, and our members are located across the U.S. and Europe. Our meetings are typically once a month on Thursday at 9 am Pacific Time in the first or second week of the month. The series is jointly organized by Brian Finch, Titus Galama, Patrick Turley and Pam Tyler (all at CESR) and hosted by the CESR/VU Amsterdam Center for the Study of Health Inequality (CSHI) and the CESR Behavioral and Health Genomics Center (BHG). If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please contact Titus Galama. For a list of upcoming, and past presentations, see the Table below.

Date  Time-9:00 AM (PT)	Speaker	Title of Talk	Suggested Literature
June 1, 2023	Michel Nivard	“Neither nature nor nurture: Using extended pedigree data to elucidate the origins of indirect genetic effects on offspring educational outcomes.”
May 4, 2023	Randi Vogt	“Scatter versus decile bar plots: What do different ways of visualizing the same polygenic index-phenotype relationship convey to lay audiences?”	(Harden & Belsky, https://bold.expert/predicting-education-from-dna/, 2018; Harden, Nat Rev Gen, 2022)
April 6, 2023	Melinda Mills	"Applications of multidimensional and longitudinal phenotype measurement in labour market sociogenomics"
March 9, 2023	Jonathan Beauchamp	"Kin-Based Institutions and Economic Development"	Link to paper: "Kin-Based Institutions and Economic Development"
February 9, 2023	Xingyan "David" Wang	"Genetic diversity fuels gene discovery for tobacco and alcohol use"	Link to paper: Genetic diversity fuels gene discovery for tobacco and alcohol use
November 4, 2022	Neil M. Davies	"Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses decrease bias in estimates of direct genetic effects"	Link to paper: Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses decrease bias in estimates of direct genetic effects
October 6, 2022	Chandra Reynolds	“Access to parks and trails and health at the cusp of midlife: individual factors and environmental selection”
September 15, 2022	David Hugh-Jones	“Trading social status for genetics in marriage markets: evidence from UK Biobank”	Link to paper: “Trading social status for genetics in marriage markets: evidence from UK Biobank”
June 2, 2022	Sam Trejo	"What Makes Us Unequal? Understanding Disagreement Regarding Genes and Social Inequality"
May 12, 2022	Malin Ericsson	“Genetic propensities and attained education: Influences on age-related health and mortality”
April 21, 2022	Daniel J. Benjamin	“Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals”	Link to article “Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals”
April 14, 2022	Paul Hufe	“Genetic Endowments, Educational Outcomes and the Mediating Influence of School Investments”
March 4, 2022	Perline Demange	“Estimating effects of parents’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills on offspring education using polygenic scores”
February 11, 2022	Sjoerd Van Alten	“The effects of demographic-based selection bias on GWAS results in the UK Biobank”
January 14, 2022	Gabriella Conti	“Genes, Parental Education, and Inequalities in Human Capital: Evidence two British Cohorts"
November 12, 2021	Leandro Carvalho	“Genotypes, Education, and Income”
October 8, 2021	Silvia Barcellos	Presentation on “The Effect of Education on the Relationship between Genetics, Early-Life Disadvantages, and Later-Life SES”
September 17, 2021	Marco Francesconi	Presentation on "Gene-Environment Effects on Female Fertility"
July 16, 2021	Victor Ronda	Presentation on “The Nurture of Nature and the Nature of Nurture: How Genes and Investments Interact in the Formation of Skills”	The Nurture of Nature and the Nature of Nurture: How Genes and Investments Interact in the Formation of Skills
June 11, 2021	Fleur Meddens	Presentation on "Genetic contributions to inequality of opportunity"
May 14, 2021	Hans van Kippersluis	Presentation on “Dynamic Complementarity in Skill Production: Evidence From Genetic Endowments and Birth Order”?
May 7, 2021	Rosa Cheesman	Presentation on “Gene-environment interactions and childhood educational achievement: do within-family polygenic score effects vary across schools and neighbourhoods?”
April 16, 2021	Pietro Biroli	Presentation on "Sources of inequality at birth: the interplay between genes and parental socioeconomic status"
March 12, 2021	Patrick Turley	Discussion on “The imprint of assortative mating in the human genome reflects human behavior and social preferences”
February 12, 2021	Alexander Young	Presentation on “Disentangling genes and environment using genomic family data”
January 8, 2021	Sjoerd Van Alten	Presentation on the topic of parent-child dyads and imputation
December 4, 2020	Neil Davies	Presentation on Mendellian randomization
November 13, 2020	Jessica Faul	Presentation on "Collecting, extracting, and storing genetic material"
August 7, 2020	Jennifer Smith	Population stratification and principal components analysis
July 10, 2020	Jason Boardman	Gene-by-environment interplay (GxE).
June 12, 2020	Aysu Okbay	Polygenic scores, what they are, how to construct them, etc	An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis
May 8, 2020	Andries Marees	Andries Marees will be leading the discussion of Chapters 1 and 3 of Mills et al. 2020	An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis
April 3, 2020	Sam Trejo	Presentation of Sam Trejo paper, Genetic Nature or Genetic Nurture? Quantifying Bias in Analyses Using Polygenic Scores	Genetic Nature or Genetic Nurture? Quantifying Bias in Analyses Using Polygenic Scores
March 13, 2020	Sjoerd van Alten	Discussion of chapter 4 of “An introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis” by Mills, Barban and Tropf, to understand the basics of Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS).	An Introduction to Statistical Genetic Data Analysis
February 14, 2020	Abdel Abdellaoui	Presentation by Abdel Abdellaoui  et al. 2019 on "Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain"	Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain