Rate My Professor Nicholas Mancuso

Nicholas Mancuso, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Quantitative and Computational Biology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He holds affiliations with the Center for Genetic Epidemiology, the Center for Statistical Genomics, and the Quantitative and Computational Biology program at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Mancuso earned his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia State University in 2014. Prior to joining USC, he was affiliated with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He joined USC as an assistant professor and was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure.

Mancuso's research focuses on developing novel computational and statistical methods to understand the genetic etiology of complex diseases. His key interests include integrating molecular phenotypes, such as gene expression and protein abundance, with large-scale genome-wide association studies; characterizing the genetic architecture of complex traits, including rare versus common variation; and quantifying the role of natural selection in shaping allele effect-size distributions. He has published highly influential papers in top journals, including "Opportunities and challenges for transcriptome-wide association studies" (Nature Genetics, 2019), "Transcriptome-wide association study of schizophrenia and chromatin activity yields mechanistic disease insights" (Nature Genetics, 2018), "Probabilistic fine-mapping of transcriptome-wide association studies" (Nature Genetics, 2019), "Trans-ancestry genome-wide association meta-analysis of prostate cancer identifies new susceptibility loci and informs genetic risk prediction" (Nature Genetics, 2021), "Local genetic correlation gives insights into the shared genetic architecture of complex traits" (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2017), and "GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy" (Nature, 2024). Recent works address multi-ancestry fine-mapping, ancestry-specific disease effects in leukemia and diabetes, and efficient single-cell eQTL mapping. Mancuso serves on the editorial board of Human Genetics and Genomics Advances, acts as co-investigator on NIH grants such as P01CA196569 and R01HG011646, and has delivered seminars including at USC's Quantitative and Computational Biology program. His contributions have advanced genetic fine-mapping, heritability partitioning, and disease mechanism elucidation, impacting cancer, psychiatric, and reproductive health research.