Ragsdale Lab
Principal Investigator: Aaron Ragsdale
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison (Madison, WI)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
This proposed research addresses unresolved and fundamental questions in human evolutionary history and genome biology. It contains three related research themes: (1) uncovering key features of human population history and structure, both in the recent and ancient past, (2) determining factors influencing selection across the genome and the limits to cross-population phenotypic prediction due to population history and natural selection, and (3) modeling and predicting the genetic basis of complex traits under realistic models of human evolutionary history, population structure and admixture. This work combines ambitious but feasible methodological developments with new sequencing data from worldwide populations. Human evolutionary history is imprinted in the DNA of people living today. Learning this history involves the combined efforts of theoretical, statistical and empirical analyses. As the volume of genome sequencing data grows, we have the opportunity to infer new details from key periods in our species’ evolution and clarify how population biology and natural selection shape phenotypic and genetic variation. This requires developing population genetic theory and computationa…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM154962-03: Population genetics of human evolutionary history and natural selection (2026)
- 5R35GM154962-02: Population genetics of human evolutionary history and natural selection (2025)
- 1R35GM154962-01: Population genetics of human evolutionary history and natural selection (2024)
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