Iain Mathieson

After degrees in mathematics and statistics, and time working in industry, Iain Mathieson moved into the field of population genetics for graduate school. He recently completed his DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of Cecilia Lindgren and Gil McVean, and has since started a postdoctoral appointment in David Reich's lab at Harvard. Mathieson's research focuses on developing population genetic based methods for inference which can be efficiently applied to large genomic datasets. In particular, he develops methods to investigate population structure and history, both as interesting quantities in themselves, and as confounding factors in other analyses such as genome-wide association studies. Much of his research has been concerned with rare variants which, now accessible through sequence data, can be highly informative about ancestry and relatedness. Mathieson intends to continue developing these methods and is particularly excited about using them to investigate data from ancient DNA in order to develop a more nuanced picture of recent human history and evolution.