Research Interests:

I am a second year graduate student with interests in demography, population genetics, molecular evolution and modern human origins.    More specifically, I am interested in inferring demographic history and evolutionary processes  from human genetic data.   Current projects include the combination of samples of putative, ancestral, ancient DNA with modern, descendant, genetic material in a maximum likelihood framework in order to develop a clearer picture of relationships over time. Another project involves finding methods to determine whether frequency spectra arising from different ascertainment methods reflect similar underlying mutation frequency structures, potentially allowing distinction between population level effects (which should be similar within a species across the genome) from genetic architecture effects (which may vary across the genome). This work is joint with Montgomery Slatkin and Martin O'Hely.  I also collaborate with Professor Svante Paabo and his staff at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology on topics ranging from cis-regulatory evolution to the evolution of alleles that have arisen recently on the human lineage (e.g. FOXP2).
 

Curriculum Vitae (html)

 

Links: NCBI Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Anthropology at Univ. of Utah

Hominoid phylogeny with baboon outgroup