Lab News

Sep. 4, 2024: Our lab is now NIH-MIRA (R35GM154856) funded for the next 5 years!

April 29, 2024: New preprint alert! If you are a SLiM person and often use a scaling factor in your simulations, you might have wondered if the scaled simulations is actually comparable to what is intended by the model. We have an answer for you here: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.27.591463. Tldr: for moderate scaling such as a factor between 2-10 (eg. in human simulations), scaled simulations are largely comparable in terms of genetic diversity and SFS, but in aggressive scalings such as in Drosophila populations, the scaled sims lead to vastly underestimated genetic diversity, especially when simulated segments are long. Besides, we find that a heuristic 10N burn-in time is insufficient for full coalescence in most simulations.

Jan. 22, 2024: Welcome new lab member! Dr. Susanna Gutierrez officially joined us as a postdoc. She will be working on adaptive introgression inference in admixed American populations. Welcome Susanna!

Nov. 15, 2023: Jun gave a departmental seminar to the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (DCMB) at the University of Michigan

Oct. 11, 2023: Jun gave a guest lecture at the California State University at Northridge over the topic of Machine Learning in Population Genetics.

Oct. 2, 2023: Dr. Michelle Kim officially joined the lab as a postdoc. She will be working on complex traits in admixed populations. Welcome Michelle!!

Sep. 25, 2023: Jun hosted Prof. Longhua Guo from the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at UMich to present at the DHG Weekly Seminar Series today.

Aug. 11, 2023: Jun's summer students, Adi Iyer (from UNC Chapel Hill) and Sally Ha (from UCSD), gave a fantastic presentation at the UCLA BIG Summer Symposium today on Detecting De Novo Mutations in GATK and FreeBayes Pipelines. Great job!

Aug. 4, 2023: The Midwest Population Genetics meeting is happening in Ann Arbor this weekend! Jun is part of the organizing committee.

Jul. 24, 2023: Jun gave a poster presentation at the SMBE2023 in Ferrara, Italy. It was lovely to catch up with all the popgen folks around the world in person after a long 4-year hiatus!

Jul. 15, 2023: Jun gave lecture on Machine Learning Applications in Population Genetics at the UCLA Computational Genomics Summer Institute 2023 in Big Bear, CA. 

May 29, 2023: Jun gave an oral presentation on the MaLAdapt paper at the Keystone symposium, E3: New Frontiers in Reconstructing Human Evolution History, in Hannover Germany. 

May 18, 2023: The inaugural EEB-DHG joint retreat is happening today! Jun is a part of the organizing committee and is giving a featured talk on Machine Learning in Population Genetics

May 4, 2023: Jun officially became a joint faculty (dry appointment) at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 

Apr. 18, 2023: Jun is going to be at the AABA2023 in Reno, Nevada from April 18-22. Come by and say hi!

Apr. 17, 2023: PIBS first-year student, Lovelyn Epelle, started her rotation with our lab today. Over the coming weeks, Lovelyn will be working on simulations of admixture events in human evolution. Welcome Lovelyn!

Apr. 11, 2023: Jun gave an invited seminar talk in the EEB department discussing adaptive introgression and admixture studies.

Mar. 6, 2023: Jun gave a invited seminar talk at the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis (where she received her PhD) discussing her most recent research and her career transition from wet-lab anthropology to dry-lab population genetics research

Feb. 15, 2023: Undergraduate student Elizabeth Meyer (Anthropology, class of 2023) joined the lab as a research assistant. She is going to help with some analyses with adaptive introgression in South American populations. Welcome Elizabeth!

Feb. 1, 2023: The Zhang Lab officially opened its door in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan! We will be working on various questions related to admixture and natural selection in shaping human genetics and health, using a combination of empirical and computational approaches. We are hiring at all levels!!