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 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 visualisation 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 (ie 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.