Multiple comparisons or multiple testing has been viewed as a thorny issue in genetic association studies aiming to detect disease-associated genetic variants from a large number of genotyped variants. Dr. Nengjun Yi, Sir David Cox Endowed Professor in Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics, Section on Statistical Genetics, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham – along with department colleagues Dr. Xiang-Yang Lou, associate professor and Mr. Himel Mallick, doctoral candidate –alleviated the problem of multiple comparisons by proposing a hierarchical modeling approach that is fundamentally different from the existing methods.