Section: Research

Jeffrey Jensen, Ph.D.

Academic Role: Assistant Professor

Faculty Appointment(s) In:
   Program in Bioinformatics & Integrative Biology
   Program in Molecular Medicine

My primary research interests may be grouped into two complementary and related areas: describing the theory of adaptive evolution, and employing this theory to computationally analyze empirical data in order to quantify the evolutionary forces shaping genomic variation in nature. Though the characterization of the relative roles of adaptive and non-adaptive processes is fundamental to the study of evolution, and has been studied for well over a century, this basic issue has historically been very difficult to address. This is largely due to statistical difficulties associated with uncoupling signatures of positive and negative selection from neutral demographic perturbations that produce similar patterns, such as population size change and structure.

In order to resolve these challenges, my research to date has focused on three main questions. First, how can reliable inference be made about the demographic histories of natural populations? Second, how can this inference be coupled with statistical tests of selection to better inform the empirical identification of adaptively important loci? And third, apart from identifying individual loci, how can the genome-wide distributions of the strength and rate of selection be estimated using DNA polymorphism data?

My approach to these questions has included experimental, computational, bioinformatic and theoretical methods; often, I evaluate new data that requires new tools to be developed for analysis, and I in turn develop new theory that informs empirical approaches.

Office: Jensen Lab
Phone: 856-6112
E-mail: Jeffrey.Jensen@umassmed.edu

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