The genetic analysis of populations

Professor McVean's research uses patterns of genetic variation among individuals to answer questions about fundamental biological processes, the nature of evolutionary processes, and the link between genetic variation and an organism's observable characteristics or detectable traits. His research aims to develop statistical and computational tools to integrate de novo sequence assembly and multiple reference sequences to best characterise the genome sequence(s) of an individual or of diverse species (such as malarial parasites). These tools will also be used to define key genomic regions (such as the HLA region) from human sequencing data and to reliably identify diverse genome-changing events from whole-genome sequence data of individuals in extended pedigrees. The genetic structure of the HLA region in different populations will be assessed to explore how variation influences the immune response to, and risk of, infectious and autoimmune diseases.