Profile

Hi!

My name is Thad, I am a D.Phil student in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. My project looks at different human populations around the world and attempts to determine which mutations are beneficial to humans. What I do is make “Coalescent Trees” from between 60-100 people’s genomes, which is to say I try and figure out how they are all related. I am sure that everyone knows what a family tree is, first you and your siblings, then your parents, then their parents and so on. What I do instead is take a bunch of modern people and then try and figure out how they are related and that allows me to build a “Coalescent Tree” which is just a fancy way of saying how everyone shares an ancestor in the past. I then use statistics on these trees to try and figure out which areas of the genome are being affected by Natural Selection.

When I get up in the morning I log into the computers that I use to do my work, I check on the programs that I am running to make sure that they are behaving and then if I have new information I try and figure out what it means, usually by turning it into informational pictures. One of the nice things about my job is that since everything I do is on a computer I can work from anywhere so long as I have my laptop and an Internet connection. This means that I am not stuck in the office when I do my work, I can work from home, from the office, from a Starbucks, just about anywhere that I can use the Internet.