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Adiposity associated mechanisms for specific mortality risk in Mexicans

  • 8 September 2025 to 2 December 2025
  • Project No: D26024
  • DPhil Project 2026
  • Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) Mexico City Prospective Study

Background

Obesity affects millions of adults worldwide and the rate of mortality attributed to obesity has been increasing in many countries. Obesity and premature mortality are common in Mexico, but mechanistic studies investigating how excess fat or various adiposity markers increase the risk from different diseases in Hispanic populations are scarce.  

The Mexico City Prospective Study (MCPS) is a prospective cohort study of 150,000 participants with socio-demographic and lifestyle characteristics, medication and disease history, biological characteristics (including genetics, NMR-metabolomics and genetically-predicted proteomics), >20 years of follow-up for cause-specific mortality, and accruing morbidity data.  

This project aims to systematically assess metabolomic mediators (~160 individual biomarkers) and proteomic-predicted mediators (~1,000 individual traits) that may explain the causal associations of various adiposity markers with specific causes of death in MCPS.  

The specific aims of the project may include:

  1. Mendelian randomisation (MR) approaches to assess causality of associations between body fat composition and distribution and specific non-fatal or fatal diseases.
  2. Multivariable MR mediation analyses to investigate the mechanisms of how different adiposity and selected omic traits influence specific diseases.
  3. Hyper-dimensional genetic colocalization of common adiposity-omic traits, decomposition and tissue-enrichment assessments, to further characterize distinct disease-specific pathways caused by distinct adiposity traits.

research experience, research methods and skills training

The student will gain experience in research methodology, genetic epidemiology systematic reviews, statistical programming, data analysis and scientific writing. 

The student will be supported to present findings at symposiums and conferences and to publish peer-reviewed papers emerging from their DPhil.  

FIELD WORK, SECONDMENTS, INDUSTRY PLACEMENTS AND TRAINING

The project will be based within the MCPS group in the Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit, a world-class community for population health research. In-house training in statistical and epidemiological methods, programming, and scientific writing will be provided.  

PROSPECTIVE STUDENT

The ideal candidate will have a good first degree and MSc in statistics, epidemiology, genetics, biomedical sciences or related subject, and proficiency with programming analyses in R, Python, STATA or SAS. 

research group