Talk by Professor Jeff Wall
Professor Jeff Wall (Oregon Health Science University) will give a talk on the 8th January at 13.00 titled ”Evolutionary consequences of endogamy, inbreeding and hybridization”
”Non-random mating is ubiquitous across species, and the extremes (i.e., inbreeding and hybridization, or the mating between individuals too closely related or too genetically different) share in common that they create genotype combinations that are otherwise extremely rare. These new genotypes are more likely to be affected by directional selection (generally purifying selection, but occasionally adaptive evolution). We illustrate examples of this in humans and macaques.”
Jeff is a computational, population and human geneticist who has worked on a wide range of topics over the past 25 years. He is best known for predicting human - Neanderthal admixture before the publication of the Neanderthal genome, and for co-developing the sequentially Markovian coalescent, which underpins many of the statistical techniques currently used for inferring demographic history. His current work focuses on the generation and analyses of large-scale genomic data sets in species of conservation importance or with active hybrid zones.