Aaron Ragsdale
Position title: Assistant Professor
Email: apragsdale@wisc.edu
Address:
Integrative Biology
Population genetics, applied math, human history and genomics
- Address
- Birge Hall 454
- Website
- https://apragsdale.github.io/
- Education
- PhD, University of Arizona; post-docs at McGill University in the Department of Human Genetics, and at LANGEBIO, CINVESTAV, Mexico
- Department
- Integrative Biology
- Research Interests
- Population genetics, applied math, human history and genomics
- Research Fields
- Computational, Systems, and Synthetic Biology, Evolutionary and Population Genetics, Humans
Research Description:
Our research aims to understand how evolutionary forces are expected to shape genetic diversity within populations, and then uses this understanding to learn about demographic and selective histories and processes from genome sequencing data. One focus of our research is on developing population genetic theory that lets us predict patterns of diversity and genetic structure under varying models of demography and selection. Another focus is on turning that theory into computational tools to compare model predictions to observations from natural populations. Finally, we have a strong interest in inferring (mostly) human evolutionary history from genetic data, including both ancient history and population structure as well as more recent migrations, movements, and dynamics.
Representative Publications:
Ragsdale, Aaron P., et al. “A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa.” bioRxiv (2022).
Ragsdale, Aaron P. “Local fitness and epistatic effects lead to distinct patterns of linkage disequilibrium in protein-coding genes.” Genetics (2022).
Baumdicker, Franz, et al. “Efficient ancestry and mutation simulation with msprime 1.0.” Genetics (2022).
Ragsdale, Aaron P., and Simon Gravel. “Unbiased estimation of linkage disequilibrium from unphased data.” Molecular Biology and Evolution (2020).
Ragsdale, Aaron P., and Simon Gravel. “Models of archaic admixture and recent history from two-locus statistics.” PLoS genetics (2019).