Andrew G. Clark
Cornell University
|
Primary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Secondary Section: 26, Genetics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2012)
|
Biosketch
Dr. Andrew G. Clark is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics at Cornell University, where he also holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biological Statistics & Computational Biology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. He is known for his work in human population genetics (haplotype inference, detecting natural selection from sequence data, demographic inference) and Drosophila population genetics and genomics (including the 12 species genome project). His undergraduate degree was from Brown University (1976) in Biology and Applied Mathematics, and his Ph.D. is from Stanford University (1980) in Population Genetics (with Marc Feldman). He was on the faculty at Penn State University prior to joining the Cornell faculty. He has been the Director of Graduate Studies of the Field of Computational Biology at Cornell. He has served on the NHGRI Council, and several NIH study sections. His editorial board experience includes Cell, Genetics, PLoS Genetics, Mol. Biol. Evol., and Genome Research. He is the co-author with Daniel Hartl of the widely used textbook, Principles of Population Genetics.
Research Interests
Andrew Clark is a population geneticist whose lab has contributed to several areas of Drosophila and human evolutionary genetics and genomics. The Drosophila work centers on complex traits, including innate immune response, lipid metabolism and storage, and sperm competition. His lab has quantified DNA sequence polymorphism in relevant genes and produced models that seek to explain variation in endpoint phenotypes that arise as a consequence of variation in genes in the respective pathways. His group has also developed methods for identification of Y-linked genes embedded in heterochromatin. His lab played a key role in pulling together the Drosophila 12 genomes analysis and publication. His work in the area of human population genomics has focused on context-dependent genetic variation associated with cardiovascular disease risk, on inference of haplotype phase, and on the use of genome-wide SNP data to make inferences about past action of natural selection and demographic changes. Most recently this has turned to analysis of very recent explosive population growth and its consequent influx of rare variation. In addition, he has pursued RNA-sequencing in reciprocal crosses of many organisms as a tool for elucidating genomic imprinting and X-inactivation.
