I am currently a D.Phil. student in the Mathematical Genetics Group and the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, affiliated with Balliol College. I started my doctoral studies in 2005, with a primary focus on developing methods for phasing haplotypes and imputing genotypes in large population genetic samples. Dr. Jonathan Marchini and Professor Peter Donnelly are supervising this work, and I also worked with them on the first phase of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium in early 2007.
Previously, I did a senior thesis project with Professor Debbie Nickerson in the University of Washington Department of Genome Sciences. For this project I measured the effective population sizes of various great ape species (including humans) and used the results to comment on models of human demographic history. I also worked in the Nickerson lab on various population genetic analyses for two years after I graduated.
My scientific interests range from classical population genetics to disease association studies to inference about aspects of extant and ancient populations (primarily human). I often find it fruitful to think of these topics in a unified framework -- e.g., to view disease susceptibility in modern human populations as the outcome of historical evolutionary and demographic processes -- since this can motivate powerful analytical techniques. I am a card-carrying Bayesian, although I have been known to deploy frequentist analyses when feeling lazy. I am a sucker for provocative ideas.
In my free time I enjoy: pretending to be a road cyclist; playing guitar (on songs that range from ill-fated renditions of radio hits to enthusiastic punk thrashing); juggling; running in the rain (after all, I've spent most of my adult life in Seattle and Oxford); and getting lost in big foreign cities with my lovely wife Meg.
I'm a relative html novice, but I hope to learn more and add some new features to this webpage in the next few months. In the meantime, you can learn more about me from my CV.
New addition! Genetics poetry.