A unifying theme among many of our faculty is the study of multifactorial inheritance, or the complex interaction of multiple genes, environment, and other factors that give rise to common heritable diseases and quantitative biological traits. This level of genetic understanding is a prerequisite to the development of individualized medicine. Our faculty take diverse approaches to this common end, including: mapping genetic determinants of common diseases; evolutionary and functional studies of gene regulation; utilizing mouse models to study behavior and other complex phenotypes; statistical descriptions of quantitative variation; decoding patterns of population genetic variation that predict meiotic recombination, population history, and multi-gene interactions; development of advanced experimental and computational technologies to dissect genetic complexity and human disease.