Seminar Series. Rasmus Nielsen- The genomic evolutionary traces of human-pathogen interactions
Dr. Nielsen received his Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley in 1998, did postdoctoral research at Harvard University and worked as an assistant professor at Cornell University from 2000-2004, transitioning to Professor of Biology at the University of Copenhagen. He joined the faculty at the departments of Integrative Biology and Statistics at Berkeley in Jan. 2008.
Dr Nielsen's work is on statistical and population genetic analyses of genomic data, in particular methods for detecting natural selection, describing population genetic variation, inferring demography, and methods for association mapping. Much of his current research concerns statistical analysis of next-generation sequencing data, both in the context of medical genetics and population genetics. Many of the methods he has developed are heavily used by other researchers, including the phylogeny based methods for detecting positive selection implemented in PAML, the methods for inferring demographic histories implemented in the IM and IMa programs, the method for detecting selective sweeps implemented in SweepFinder, and the methods for analysing Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data implemented in ANGSD.