Jonathan K. Pritchard

Biosketch

Jonathan Pritchard, PhD is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Departments of Genetics and Biology at Stanford University. Pritchard grew up mainly in Britain before moving to Pennsylvania during high school. He received undergraduate degrees in biology and mathematics at Penn State (1994), and a PhD in biology from Stanford (1998). After postdoctoral work in statistics at the University of Oxford, he became an assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago (2001). He was subsequently appointed to full professor (2006), and to an investigator position at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2008-2019). Since 2013, he has served as a professor of Genetics and Biology at Stanford University. Awards include the Mitchell Prize from the American Statistical Association and the International Society of Bayesian Analysis, the Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America, and the Fabio Frassetto International Prize in Physical Anthropology from the Lincean Academy of Italy.

Research Interests

Dr. Pritchard’s work uses computational and statistical approaches to study human genetic variation and evolution. He has done wide-ranging research on human population structure, history and adaptation, and on the genetic basis of complex traits. One of his key early contributions was the Structure algorithm for using genetic data to infer population structure and personal ancestry. More recently, the Pritchard lab has focused on studying the molecular mechanisms that link genetic variation to effects on gene regulation, cellular processes and ultimately variation in organism-level traits and diseases. One major focus has been on modeling and measuring the flow of genotype effects through gene regulatory networks, with a long-term goal of making genetic association studies more interpretable and mechanistic.