Brian C. Zhang

  • PhD, University of Oxford
I defended my PhD in 2022 and am now working as a computational biologist at Adaptive Biotechnologies!
At Oxford, I was a member of Pier Palamara’s group. We developed a method, ARG-Needle, to infer the genome-wide genealogy of a set of genetic samples from genotyping array or sequencing data. We built the genome-wide genealogy of 337K samples in the UK Biobank and scanned the genealogy for associations with 7 complex traits. This yielded more rare and ultra-rare associations than found by genotype imputation, which were overall enriched for loss-of-function variation. See our paper in Nature Genetics or my thesis.
During my PhD, I was supported by the Clarendon Scholarship and was a member of St. John’s College. Before Oxford, I worked for two years as a research engineer at DeepMind in London.
Interests. Statistical Genetics, Population Genetics, Machine Learning

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2023
2019
2018
2017
D.Phil. Thesis