• Alan Aw reports a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology, on the bounds on homozygosity and entropy statistics that measure genetic diversity in terms of the frequency of the most frequent allele. Alan uses the theory of majorization to obtain the bounds, generalizing previous mathematical results from the lab [52] [87].

• Amy Goldberg and Lawrence Uricchio report an overview of the literature on natural selection in human populations in an Oxford Bibliographies article.

• A commentary on Anthony Edwards's 2003 essay of multivariate classification of individuals into populations on the basis of genetic markers appears in a new book edited by Rasmus Winther about Edwards's career and contributions. Among other topics, the commentary discusses the influence of Edwards's model on a phenotypic model from the lab [129].

• Nicolas Alcala — Postdoc with Matthieu Foll, International Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization, Lyon.
• Filippo Disanto — Junior faculty, Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa (sponsored by the Rita Levi Montalcini researcher program).
• Doc Edge — Postdoc with Graham Coop, Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis.
• Olga Kamneva — Bioinformatics Scientist, Affymetrix, Inc.

• Reuters story about work by Amy Goldberg on human population size history in South America.
• Forensic Magazine story and profile about Bridget Algee-Hewitt and her work in craniometrics.
• Forensic Magazine story about work by Bridget Algee-Hewitt, Doc Edge, and Jaehee Kim on ancestry information in the CODIS forensic genetic markers.

• PhD student Amy Goldberg reports a study of the effect of sex-biased admixture on the X chromosome. The study has a number of surprises: (1) The admixture level on the X chromosome is not simply a 2/3-and-1/3 linear combination of female and male parameters. (2) A difference in X chromosomal and autosomal levels of admixture need not imply male bias entering the admixed population from one source and female bias from a second source: the bias can be in the same direction in both source populations, but with different magnitudes. (3) A third surprise involves the appearance of a sequence related to the Fibonacci numbers! The paper follows two previous articles from the lab on mechanistic models of admixture ([82], [122]).

• We report a review of three cases in which differences in levels of genetic diversity across populations contribute to population differences in societal variables — related to forensic testing, transplantation matching, and genome-wide association. The study also considers a fourth scenario, performing a reanalysis that contests a claim that within-population genetic diversity has influenced global economic development. PhD student Jonathan Kang contributed to the project. [Genes to Genomes blog post from the Genetics Society of America]

• Nicolas Alcala — Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship (2015-2017).
• Amy Goldberg — Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Fellowship from the Northern California Chapter of the ARCS Foundation (2015-2016).
• Lawrence Uricchio — Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-2016).

• In a study of Y-chromosomal lineages in the Samaritans, Oefner et al. find that most Samaritans have a distinctive Y chromosome similar to that of Jewish Cohen lineages. Curiously, among the Samaritans, the only exception distant from the Cohen model haplotype is that of the Samaritan Cohen lineage.
• An international team including graduate student Naama Kopelman studies genetic relationships with the Ashkenazi Jewish population in a large genome-wide data set, finding considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations and tracing more distant relationships to other populations of Europe and the Middle East.
• Read the introduction to the special issue, by Noah Rosenberg and Steven Weitzman.

• Bridget Algee-Hewitt; Bridget joins us as a postdoc from the University of Tennessee, where she completed an earlier postdoctoral fellowship in forensic anthropology.
• Arbel Harpak; Arbel joins us as a PhD student after having completed his MS in ecology, evolution, and behavior at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• Jonathan Kang; Jonathan joins us a PhD student. His undergraduate degree is in applied mathematics and biology from Brown University, and most recently he has been performing research at the Bioinformatics Institute of Singapore.
• Rohan Mehta; Rohan joins us as a PhD student after having completed his BS in biology and mathematics at the University of California, San Diego.

• Lars Andersen; Lars joins us as a postdoc from the University of Aarhus, where he received his PhD in probability theory and performed postdoctoral work in population genetics.
• Doc Edge; Doc returns as a PhD student to Stanford, where he previously completed his BA in human biology. He joins us after earning his MA in statistics at the University of California at Berkeley.
• Amy Goldberg; Amy rejoins us as a PhD student. She was previously at the University of Michigan, where she completed her BS in biological anthropology and mathematics and was an undergraduate in the lab in its former home.

We say goodbye to:

• Erkan Buzbas, completing his postdoc and joining the faculty of \ the University of Idaho as Assistant Professor of Statistical Science
• Zach Szpiech, receiving his PhD and starting a\ postdoc with Ryan Hernandez, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco
• Cuong Than, continuing in his postdoctoral studies wit\ h Daniel Huson, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Tubingen
• Paul Verdu, completing his post\ doc and joining the faculty of the Natural History Museum of Paris as CNRS Associate Scientist
• Chaolong Wang, receiving his PhD and starting a postdoc \ with Liming Liang and Xihong Lin, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health

We wish everyone all the best in their new positions!

Chaolong, Noah, and Zach at the University of Michigan Department of Computational Medicine and Biology, with graduate program director Margit Burmeister and founding center director Gil Omenn

Zach's thesis on "Human migration, population divergence, and the accumulation of deleterious alleles: insights from private genetic variation and whole-exome sequencing" considers several perspectives on private alleles, including a model of microsatellite private alleles, a method for counting private alleles in uneven samples, and a study of connections among rare, private, and deleterious variants.

Chaolong's thesis on "Statistical methods for analyzing human genetic variation in diverse populations" considers new approaches for studying spatial population-genetic variation, and develops a new method for circumventing allelic dropout in microsatellite data without requiring replicate genotypes.

In the second paper, Laura Helmkamp and Ethan Jewett have developed three more methods in the same family of approaches: iSD, iSTEAC, and iMAC. Laura and Ethan's paper appears in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology in honor of Simon Tavaré and Mike Waterman.