UGI External Seminar - Alice Pearson, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge
Title: Estimating local ancestry and demographic parameters of Europeans using genealogies and ancient human DNA
UGI External Seminar - Alice Pearson, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge
15 Sep 2021, 15:00 – 16:00
Abstract: Consideration of genetic history is important to understanding recent evolutionary changes in human populations and how genomes affect present-day people. Ancient DNA helps us to infer past evolutionary events by providing genetic data-points before, during and after such events. My presentation will be about firstly, building a model of population structure in West Eurasia. Next, I describe a method for inferring local ancestry by embedding tree sequences generated from modern and ancient European samples in this model. Lastly, with these local ancestry assignments and tree sequences, I estimate various demographic parameters of ancient and modern Europeans.
Bio: I am working as a genetic data analyst as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project looking at diseases in ancient human genomes. Recently I have been applying machine learning techniques to ancient genetic data to quantify ancestry and evolutionary processes in a different way.S