The Keinan Lab

The Keinan lab aims to improve the search for complex disease genes and genes underlying other complex traits, with the key driving hypothesis being that characterizing human population genomics can inform the design and analysis of medical genetic studies. This hypothesis received fresh support from the lab's work on the effect that recent human explosive population growth has had on the accumulation of rare genetic variants and the extensive implications of that discovery for gene-disease association studies (Keinan & Clark, Science 2012). Hence, the lab studies how demographic history and natural selection have shaped patterns of human genetic variation, and translates that knowledge to the study of the genetic basis of complex human diseases. Members of the lab come from varied backgrounds, including in computer science, statistics, genetics, genomics, physics, anthropology, and biology, which enables the collaborative development of computational and statistical methods, their efficient application to large-scale, genomic data sets, and the interpretation of discoveries in light of gene function and anthropological evidence.