Elizabeth A. Thompson

As a statistical scientist, my research interest has always been the development of models and methods of inference from genetic data on related individuals within a species. These relationships may either be the known pedigree relationships of family studies or members of genetic isolates, or the unknown relationships of members of larger populations. While much of my work has been focused on human populations, I have also had a long-term interest in the role of pedigree and population structure in maintaining genetic variation in small populations of endangered plants and animals. Modern genomic data make it increasingly possible to infer coancestry of segments of our genomes, and model-based inferences from multiple genomes allow new approaches to old questions ranging from analyses of long-term genetic differentiation of widely dispersed populations, to short-term extinction of genes in the small population of a highly endangered species; from inference of genealogical relationships among individuals to inference of the genetic basis of traits from data observed on members of a known pedigree; and from analyses of patterns of genome sharing from the meiosis process in plants to modern methods for human genetic linkage analysis.