Using large‐scale genome sequence data to understand genetic variation, population history, and genome evolution.
Research Area
Richard Durbin is a computational biologist whose group works at the intersection of evolutionary genomics, computer science, and mathematics, using large‐scale genome sequence data to understand genetic variation, population history, and genome evolution. His major strands of his research include:
- Investigating evolutionary genomics in non‐human taxa, in particular the adaptive radiation and speciation of cichlid fishes in Lake Malawi. His group examines hybridisation, selection, and how genetic variation relates to morphological/ecological diversity.
- Studying the role of transposable elements in genome evolution, in collaboration with Felipe Karam-Teixeira in the department.
- Developing computational algorithms, methods and software for handling the huge volumes of genomic data. This includes work on genome assembly (especially using long‐read technologies), efficient representations of variation (e.g. graph genomes), data structures, compression, mapping, etc.
- Generating high‐quality reference genomes of vertebrates and other non‐model organisms.
- Ancient DNA. Applying theory from population genetics to both modern and historical genomes and sedimentary environmental DNA to reconstruct past population structure and ancient environments.
Project Interests
Depending on the interests and expertise of the student, I am interested in hosting students in any of the areas of evolutionary and population genetics that my group works on. The projects will involve the computational analysis of large genomic datasets that are either publicly available or are being generated by our group or collaborators.