January 26, 2021 Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell’s Ithaca campus have developed a new computational method for studying genetic and environmental interactions and how they influence disease risk. The research, published Jan. 7 in The American Journal of Human Genetics, makes the process of finding these interactions much less difficult and demonstrates their importance in determining body mass index and diabetes risk. “Our study demonstrates that your genes matter and the environment matters and that the interaction of the two can increase risk for disease,” said co-senior author Olivier Elemento, a professor of computational genomics in computational biomedicine, professor of physiology and biophysics, associate director of the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine, and director of the Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.