My group’s research interests focus on the area of population genetics, specifically the use of stochastic models to understand patterns of variation in samples drawn from a population. Work is also ongoing on methods to map disease genes in admixed populations, and methods for fine-mapping association signals. I spend part of my time in the Department of Statistics, and part of my time at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG).

For a number of years I have worked on studying patterns of recombination in different species, currently including humans, chimpanzees and mice, and this continues to be a strong theme of the group. I developed methods to detect such hotspots from genetic data, based on using the coalescent with recombination as a model for the population genealogy. The key achievements of this work have been in demonstrating that recombination occurs very unevenly throughout the human genome, with most recombination occurring in narrow hotspots in both sexes, and that most hotspots have a short lifespan and are not shared with chimpanzee. In the last three years, this work has further led directly on to the identification of the first sequence motifs that are associated with hotspot activity in humans, evidence that these same motifs mark sites of recurrent disease-causing genomic rearrangements in humans, and the identification of a gene, PRDM9, binding one of these motifs. Currently, my group is actively continuing this research, using both population genetics based and experimental approaches.