Projects:
Participating researchers:
Qiyuan Peng
ESSGN doctoral candidate
Email: qiyuanp@uio.no
Website: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pengqiyuan1128
Qiyuan Peng is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo (UiO) School of Psychology, affiliated with PROMENTA, where she collaborates with Alexandra Havdahl, Eivind Ystrøm, and Rosa Cheesman. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social science and genetics, with a primary focus on education, health, well-being, and social inequality. Her research approach involves combining theoretical models with robust causal inference methods, utilizing extensive micro-level datasets. This approach enables her to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of her findings and simulate alternative policies. Currently, her work centres on identifying causal intergenerational effects on educational achievement. She is also developing innovative methods to disentangle the direct and indirect genetic effects of mothers and fathers on their offspring’s educational achievement in Norway.
Ralph Porneso
ESSGN doctoral candidate
Email: ralphp@uio.no
Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ralph-Porneso
Ralph Porneso aims to identify and model non-additive genetic effects and how these interact with psychosocial factors to shape complex traits. His formal education is in Neuroscience. In 2021, he trained in the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) where he participated in rabies-virus monosynaptic retrograde tracing to identify the input circuitry of Chandelier cells in the mouse primary visual cortex. In addition, he performed immunohistochemistry to detect structural synaptic plasticity in these cells and their target, Layer 2 Pyramidal cells. He reconstructed mouse brains in 3D to visualize the sources of inputs of Chandelier cells and quantified the structural plasticity of the pre- and post-synapse using multi-level mixed effects models (in publication, preprint available in Researchgate). In 2022, he performed an ERC-funded meta-analysis together with the Health Sciences Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to assess the effect of different interventions aimed at increasing transversal skills of students in higher education (in preparation).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
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