My research nestles around several general themes:
Genetic data traces human history, both ancient and recent. In many cases, genetics mirrors geography, like in Africa and in Europe. Genetics can sometimes cleanly separate continental and subcontinental populations world-wide. Other times it reflects subtle population history differences, such as in Latinos.
The more we explore, the more we see the prevalence of gene flow between populations involved in shaping nearly all of human evolution, which is less linear than textbook timelines like to show. In my research, I develop methods for estimating local ancestry resulting from recent admixture (PCAdmix) and study the complex history of many modern populations that reflect the impact of post-Columbian intercontinental migrations.
One of the biggest puzzles faced by researchers today is how to make sense of the egads of genetic data available. Luckily, statistics loves doing the heavy lifting necessary to extract signals from noise, and make inferences of estimates we are interested in, such as heterozygosity from low coverage sequence data (HetEM).