Ryan K. Waples
Research
My primary research interests lie in population genetics, especially developing and applying methods to understand the recent history of populations. I work with both human and non-human populations, often with a history of admixture. I am currently working on methods that utilize local ancestry information to understand the recent demographic history of admixed populations.
Recent work has focused on:
- Understanding the genetic history of Greenlandic-European contact paper
- Inferring relatedness in the absence of allele frequencies paper
- Assessing genetic diversity in African Leopards paper
- Inferring linkage disequilibrium (LD) patterns in recently admixed populations method
- Better quantifying uncertainty when genetic data are not independent (and they never are!) paper
I am a postdoc with Dr. Sharon Browning at the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Statistical Population Genetics from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019, co-advised by Dr. Ida Moltke and Dr. Anders Albrechtsen. My thesis “Relatdness, admixture and the genetic history of Greenland-European contact” is available here.
I obtained my M.S. in 2015 from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington and my B.A. from Wesleyan University in 2004.