Dr. Dajiang Liu's lab is a small research group at Penn State College of Medicine that works on statistical genetics, complex trait genetics and functional genomics. The lab actively develops novel methods and applies them to interesting datasets. It also generates datasets using high-throughput genotyping and sequencing.

The lab's statistical genetics research focuses on method development for analyzing large scale sequence-based association studies. The Liu lab developed the widely-used software package RAREMETAL and RVTESTS for association analysis and meta-analysis and is actively conducting research in this area to develop more efficient and powerful methods for studying the genetic basis for complex traits. 

Dr. Liu's lab develops computational methods to interpret the GWAS findings using integrative approaches and is also developing methods to study the functional genomics for X chromosome inactivation. 

The lab studies a few complex traits in great detail, including lipids and cardiovascular disease, smoking drinking addiction as well as lupus. Many of the applied projects offered interesting problems and motivated the lab's methodology research.