Positive Selection: Is the Human Genome Evolving? October 14, 2009

Favorite:

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/03/Dr_Katherine_Pollard_What_Makes_Us_Human

UCSF biostatistics professor Dr. Katherine Pollard describes The Chimp Genome Project, which lists 15 genes associated with human diseases that originate in chimps. While some people have the "new human version" of the gene, others still have the "chimp version." Evidence, she claims, that humans are evolving away from their ancestral version.

-----

We are in the midst of a renaissance in the biological sciences, which is spurring the growth of brand new fields like functional and comparative genomics. These new fields are revealing novel insights into evolutionary biology, medicine, developmental biology and many other areas, transforming the way scientists look at life.

Join the California Academy of Sciences to learn about genomics, hear about compelling current research, and explore the future of this rapidly advancing field. - California Academy of Sciences

Katherine Pollard received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology. After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing.

In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome.

In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.