Dr. Rasmus Nielsen

Biography

Rasmus Nielsen is a professor of computational biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has served since 2008. He previously held a professorship in biology at the University of Copenhagen from 2004. He earned his PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley in 1998 and completed a postdoc at Harvard University. Nielsen has also held a faculty position at Cornell University in the now-defunct Department of Biometrics from 2000 to 2004. His research focuses on developing statistical computational methods for analyzing genomic data, and he has contributed to widely used software packages including IM, ANGSD, and PAML. His work aims to make inferences about evolutionary processes from molecular genetic data, with current projects involving human population genetics, comparative evolutionary genomics, and the application of statistical methods in molecular ecology. Notable examples of his research include the analysis of large ancient DNA datasets to understand human history and the development of methods to infer patterns of demography, recombination, and mutation using ancestral recombination graphs.

Research Interests

Experience