SMBE 2026 Workshop Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament kickoff June 28
SMBE 2026 Workshop: Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GHIST) kickoff
🗓️ June 28
🔗 smbe2026.org/programme
#SMBE2026
Second- or third-year PhD student in biological or biomedical sciences? Get ready — applications for our #GilliamFellows Program open Sept. 1! Robust research support, incredible scientific community, & tailored professional development that can transform a PhD journey. 🧪 bit.ly/4bjdTmr
Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...
The PopGen Vienna Seminar series schedule is ready for the next term (March-June). It's jam-packed with fantastic speakers in #evolution, #genetics, #genomics, #popgen, and more! Details and streaming link signup can be found on our website popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/
Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!
Very excited about this year’s Biology of Genomes meeting, especially keynotes from @jkpritch.bsky.social and @janetk.bsky.social. A great venue to see what’s new and upcoming in genomics, writ broadly. Abstract submissions due in 1 week!
Happy to share my work with my advisor Zachary Szpiech! Why are associations between ROH & complex traits inconsistent across studies? We use realistic simulations to show how demographic history and genetic architecture interact to shape the phenotypic impact of ROH. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The registration deadline is fast approaching for probgen 2026! Abstracts due by January 15, registration by January 31
probgen2026.github.io
Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Well well. The standard model for how frequencies of recessive disease genes are established doesn't work. And that seems to be because recessive variants are visible to selection due to pleiotropy. (But still we teach Mendelian genetics...)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
n/n Last but not least, HUGE thanks to my postdoc Michelle for trusting me and becoming my first lab member, and for being absolutely awesome and making this work happen! And many thanks to @arundurvasula.bsky.social too for our one more collaboration!
7/n We validated all major findings using real data from All of Us and UK Biobank, showing strong agreement between theory, simulations, and empirical results
6/n One should always run GWAS in target population and forget about GWAS transfer: population-matched GWAS consistently yields the best prediction accuracy, in both homogeneous and admixed populations. Cross-population PRS transfer remains highly limited regardless of how GWAS is designed
5/n: Rare variants matter a ton: they contribute substantially to heritability in traits under stronger selection but are inherently missed by GWAS, leading to persistent missing heritability even at ultra large sample sizes and upwardly bias SNP-based heritability estimates
4/n tldr: GWAS power strongly depends on demographic history and selection strength, as we already know. However, fine-mapping precision is surprisingly robust across populations and improves mainly with recombination rate
3/n Here we built a simulation framework with realistic admixture scenarios and explicit tracking of true causal variants, allowing us to separate what GWAS can detect from what it systematically misses
2/n As genetic studies become more diverse, we wanted to systematically understand for how evolutionary history affects GWAS power, fine-mapping, missing heritability, and PRS performance in admixed populations.
Preprint online right before the holidays! Excited to share the first piece of work from the Zhang Lab, led by my absolutely stellar postdoc Michelle Kim! In this work, we ask how admixture, selection and demography shape complex trait genetics and GWAS performance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Work from my amazing undergrad @leyan-wang.bsky.social is just preprinted! TL;DR: If you worry that ARG methods might fail on unphased data due to phasing errors, you may not need to.
Check it out & consider reposting to support a great young scientist!
And another paper from the admixlab: SAI - statistics for adaptive introgression!
doi.org/10.1093/molb...
I am thrilled to share this paper outlining some ideas I’ve been thinking about for a little while on a simple but powerful approach for predicting risk of inbreeding depression from long runs of homozygosity and non-ROH heterozygosity. 1/n @klohmueller.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...
I am seeking a postdoc for my group at UCLA. We work at the intersection of population genetics x microbiome (garud.eeb.ucla.edu). If interested, please message me!
Sophie Buysse's paper on short stamen loss in Arabipsis is published in this month's Evolution issue!! academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... @journal-evo.bsky.social
Having major FOMO about #SMBE2025 in my hometown… but I’m very proud that my postdoc, Susanna Gutierrez, will be presenting our work on inferring the selection history of adaptive introgression candidates in Peruvians at poster S12-P19. Please visit her during poster session 3 if you're interested!
The preliminary program of ProbGen 2026, which will be held at UC Berkeley, is now up: probgen2026.github.io
Sharing on behalf of Rasmus Nielsen who is not on this site. For more see his thread on that other site: x.com/ras_nielsen/...
Amazing!! Congratulations!!!
Thank you!
Thanks Bernard!!
n/n This was my last postdoc project that finally got completed with tremendous help from my postdoc mentors Kirk and Sriram, two UMich biostats MS students (Jiongxuan Yang and Lingxuan Zhu), and many colleagues and friends in MI and CA (esp. Jazlyn Mooney). Can't thank them all enough!
