Yan Wong

I’m an evolutionary geneticist with an interest in a wide range of biological problems. After a DPhil in Plant Sciences at Oxford, I collaborated with Richard Dawkins to write The Ancestor’s Tale, a comprehensive history of life in reverse time. This was followed by a period as a lecturer at the University of Leeds. I then had a stint as a TV and radio presenter, most notably on the BBC One show “Bang Goes The Theory”.

I work for the Centre for Human Genetics, and am based in the Big Data Institute, where I am responsible for work on the tree sequence toolkit: open source software which can be used to store and analyse huge genomic datasets using an “evolutionary encoding” of the data. I am also heavily involved in the OneZoom project, an online visualisation of the entire tree of life, with links to the Encyclopedia of Life and Open Tree of Life projects.

At the BDI, and in collaboration with colleagues in the Oxford Department of Statistics, I’m particularly interested in methods to simulate, represent, and infer total genetic ancestry (i.e. Ancestral Recombination Graphs) from large genomic datasets. These approaches can help understand recent evolutionary history and the origin of genetic differences between individuals, not only in humans but in all organisms: current species of interest include rice and SARS-CoV-2. I am involved in several national and international collaborations, and am keen to collaborate or co-supervise students in this area; please feel free to get in touch if this is of interest.