Kirk Lohmueller, Ph.D. in Genetics
Professor
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Department of Human Genetics
I am a population geneticist whose research focuses on developing and implementing computational approaches to understand the causes and consequences of genetic variation in natural populations in a wide array of species. While my research group is entirely computational, we focus on addressing biological questions using large-scale genomic data. We develop our own new statistical approaches when existing tools are not well suited for the particular questions or data. Much of our recent work focuses on building models of evolutionary processes to better understand deleterious genetic variation in a variety of species and populations. We are especially interested in how deleterious mutations influence fitness in small populations of conservation concern, including those in California, like the Channel Island fox.