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Yosuke Tanigawa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA, where he leads the UCLA Tanigawa Lab.

The UCLA Tanigawa Lab is recruiting!

Yosuke works at the intersection of statistical genetics and computational biology. Specifically, he develops computational and statistical methods to dissect disease heterogeneity and apply them in systematic analyses of large-scale phenotypic, genetic, epigenomic, functional genomic, and single-cell genomic datasets.

Please check his CV, the Publications page, and his Google Scholar profile.

Research interests

I work in the following three research areas.

• Disease heterogeneity dissection through development of statistical and computational methods
  • Decomposition of Genetic Associations: Tanigawa*, Li*, et al., Nat Commun. (2019).
  • Ontology-guided stratified enrichment of transcription factor binding sites: Tanigawa*, Dyer*, Bejerano, PLoS Comput Biol (2022).
• Polygenic scores methodology and applications.
  • Multi-ancestry: Tanigawa and Kellis, Am J Hum Genet. (2023)
  • Multi-trait: Sinnott-Armstrong*, Tanigawa*, et al., Nat Genet. (2021).
• Therapeutic target discovery using human genetics.
  • ANGPTL7, intraocular pressure, and glaucoma: Tanigawa, et al., PLoS Genet. (2020).
  • Blood and urine biomarkers: Sinnott-Armstrong*, Tanigawa*, et al., Nat Genet. (2021).

Research overview

The video above is from the CSAIL Computational Biology Lab Tour in 2024, a research overview tailored for the industry audience.

News

• 2026/5/15: New Preprint. Li et al. “Dissecting Alzheimer’s disease heterogeneity by cross-trait polygenic prediction.” Led by Bill Li, this work uses phenome-wide PGS libraries in ROSMAP to reveal multiple polygenic dimensions of Alzheimer’s disease heterogeneity.
• 2026/5/15: New Publication. Hou et al. “Genotype epigenome phenotype integration reveals peripheral immune contributions to type I bipolar disorder” was published in Nature Communications. Led by Lei Hou, the study integrates peripheral immune epigenomics, whole-genome sequencing, and clinical data to identify regulatory mechanisms, patient subtypes, and therapeutic candidates in type I bipolar disorder.
• 2026/2/25: Yosuke will present at UCLA’s Frontiers in Computational Medicine Seminar.
• See News (2025) and the News Archive.

Blog posts

I write blog posts mostly on computing tips, including:

• GWAS and genetic analyses with PLINK2 and pgenlibr
• Notes on Apache Columnar format
• Working with very small values in R
• Commonly used commands in high-performance cluster computing with Slurm workload manager
• Links to useful resources

Contact

Email is the best way to reach me. If you do not get a reply within two days, please do not hesitate to follow up. Thank you very much for your interest in our work.

• Email:
  • If you are inquiring about joining the Tanigawa lab, please write to joinus [at] tanigawalab <dot> org.
  • For all other inquiries, please send your email to: tanigawa [at] ucla <dot> edu.
• Social media accounts can be found on the left (for PC) or the “Follow” button at the top (for smartphone).