Bojung Seo is a second-year Epidemiology PhD student at the Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, she worked at Pfizer Korea and Janssen Korea as a real-world data specialist. Bojung earned her master’s degree in Epidemiology at Korea University. She was trained in fundamental and advanced epidemiology, data management, and biostatistics.

Bojung recently expanded her research area to bioinformatics to learn computational architectures that can be used in her proposed study in combination with other statistical approaches. In one recent research investigation, she explored the association between leukocyte telomere length and habitual dietary factors and won a poster award at the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center Cancer Research Day. She has also actively participated in skin cancer research regarding the relationship between sunbed usage and skin cancer-related outcomes.

Based on her background and research experiences, Bojung will explore the association analysis between genes related to sunburn susceptibility and plasma glutamine and glutamate levels-associated with melanoma from the Nurses’ Health Study I and II. The Nurses’ Health Study and Nurses’ Health Study II are among the largest investigations into the risk factors for major chronic diseases in women.

Her work will be carried out by a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in two steps: (1) GWAS for sunburn phenotypes to find single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with sun sensitivity and (2) the identified SNPs will be tested for their associations with plasma glutamate/glutamine levels in overall or subgroup populations. This will be the first study on a potential association between sunburn associated SNPs and plasma glutamate/glutamine in relation to melanoma. This work will advance our understanding of melanoma and identify potential/actionable targets for therapeutic intervention.