Yan Wong
MA, DPhil
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 of time as a lecturer at the University of Leeds. I then had a period of time as a TV and radio presenter, most notably on the BBC One show Bang Goes The Theory
.
At the BDI I work with Jerome Kelleher and colleagues developing 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 visualization of the entire tree of life, with links to the Encyclopedia of Life and Open Tree of Life projects.
At the BDI, I’m particularly interested in methods to infer total evolutionary ancestry (i.e. Ancestral Recombination Graphs) from large genomic datasets, both in humans and other organisms. I am keen to collaborate or co-supervise students in this area: please feel free to get in touch if this is of interest.
Recent publications
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A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes
Journal article
WONG HY. et al, (2022), Science
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Dynamic visualisation of million-tip trees: The OneZoom project
Journal article
Wong Y. and Rosindell J., (2021), METHODS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
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Efficient ancestry and mutation simulation with msprime 1.0.
Journal article
Baumdicker F. et al, (2021), Genetics
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A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes
Preprint
Wohns AW. et al, (2021)
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Inferring whole-genome histories in large population datasets.
Journal article
Kelleher J. et al, (2019), Nature genetics, 51, 1330 - 1338