The genetics of educational success

Is educational success already determined at birth?

Dr Ziada Ayorech will hold a talk on what can the genes tell us about educational success. It has recently become possible to predict educational outcomes using common genetic variants. Such variants predicting long education can be aggregated into “polygenic scores”. Such scores constitute a person specific indicator of genetic risk and resilience, are permeating the social, behavioural and biomedical sciences.

She will discuss how polygenic scores contribute to our understanding of social mobility, success at university, and early adult educational and occupational trajectories.

After the lecture there will be a discussion of the usefulness of these methods in the social and behavioural sciences.

About the lecturer

Dr Ziada Ayorech is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience; King's College London. She has studied the genetics of educational attainment using the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) run by Robert Plomin.

PROMENTA Research Center

PROMENTA is based at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo (UiO). PROMENTA’s partner institutions are the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, UiO; the University Center for Information Technology, UiO; the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; the Norwegian WHO Healthy Cities Network; Oslo Metropolitan University; Leiden University; and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Contact

Eivind Ystrøm for questions: eivind.ystrom@psykologi.uio.no

Published Apr. 15, 2019 1:59 PM - Last modified Apr. 21, 2022 9:27 AM