Jonathan K. Pritchard

Last updated
Jonathan Pritchard
Alma mater
Awards Edward Novitski Prize (2013)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Methods for inferring human evolutionary history using genetic markers  (1998)
Doctoral advisor Marcus Feldman [2]
Other academic advisors Peter Donnelly
Website pritchardlab.stanford.edu

Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution. [3] His research interests lie in the study of human evolution, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits. [1] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [ excessive citations ]

Contents

Education

Pritchard's family moved to the US when he was a teenager. He studied biology and mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, and then went on to graduate studies in biology at Stanford University under the supervision of Marc Feldman, finishing in 1998. [10]

Career

Pritchard conducted postdoctoral research with Peter Donnelly at the University of Oxford. It was there that he developed STRUCTURE, a widely used computer program for determining population structure and estimating individual admixture. [5] In 2001, he moved to the University of Chicago. He was promoted from Assistant Professor to Full Professor in 2006. He stayed there until moving to Stanford in 2013. [3] He was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator position in 2008. [10]

Awards and honours

Pritchard was a recipient of the 2013 Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America and the 2002 Mitchell Prize from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

Personal life

Pritchard ran track and cross country for Pennsylvania State University from 1989 to 1994. In part because of his running experience, he appeared in the 1998 movie Without Limits portraying David Bedford, an English distance runner who participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics. As a result of his appearance in Without Limits and his publication of ″Population Growth of Human Y Chromosomes: A study of Y Chromosome Microsatellites″ with Marcus Feldman, [11] he has an Erdős–Bacon number of 6.

Related Research Articles

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A microsatellite is a tract of repetitive DNA in which certain DNA motifs are repeated, typically 5–50 times. Microsatellites occur at thousands of locations within an organism's genome. They have a higher mutation rate than other areas of DNA leading to high genetic diversity. Microsatellites are often referred to as short tandem repeats (STRs) by forensic geneticists and in genetic genealogy, or as simple sequence repeats (SSRs) by plant geneticists.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human genetic variation</span> Genetic diversity in human populations

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References

  1. 1 2 Jonathan K. Pritchard publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. ↑ Jonathan K. Pritchard at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 Pritchard Lab website: http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu
  4. ↑ Birney, E; Pritchard, J. K. (2014). "Archaic humans: Four makes a party". Nature. 505 (7481): 32–4. Bibcode:2014Natur.505...32B. doi: 10.1038/nature12847 . PMID   24352230.
  5. 1 2 Pritchard, J. K.; Stephens, M; Donnelly, P (2000). "Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data". Genetics. 155 (2): 945–59. doi:10.1093/genetics/155.2.945. PMC   1461096 . PMID   10835412.
  6. ↑ Jonathan K. Pritchard's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  7. ↑ Rosenberg, N. A.; Pritchard, J. K.; Weber, J. L.; Cann, H. M.; Kidd, K. K.; Zhivotovsky, L. A.; Feldman, M. W. (2002). "Genetic Structure of Human Populations" (PDF). Science. 298 (5602): 2381–2385. Bibcode:2002Sci...298.2381R. doi:10.1126/science.1078311. PMID   12493913. S2CID   8127224.
  8. ↑ Falush, D.; Stephens, M.; Pritchard, J. K. (2007). "Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data: Dominant markers and null alleles". Molecular Ecology Notes. 7 (4): 574–578. doi:10.1111/j.1471-8286.2007.01758.x. PMC   1974779 . PMID   18784791.
  9. ↑ Pritchard, J. K.; Stephens, M; Rosenberg, N. A.; Donnelly, P (2000). "Association mapping in structured populations". The American Journal of Human Genetics. 67 (1): 170–81. doi:10.1086/302959. PMC   1287075 . PMID   10827107.
  10. 1 2 Jonathan K. Pritchard, Ph.D., Bios of the 2008 New HHMI Investigators, HHMI, retrieved 2011-07-24.
  11. ↑ Pritchard, J. K.; Seielstad, M. T.; Perez-Lezaun, A; Feldman, M. W. (1999). "Population growth of human Y chromosomes: A study of Y chromosome microsatellites". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 16 (12): 1791–8. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a026091 . PMID   10605120.
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