ERA Chair

Jon Anders Eriksson, PhD, ERA Chair holder,

Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Research in Genomics

Dr Eriksson is a broadly trained evolutionary geneticist working with computational modelling and quantitative analysis at the intersection of medical genomics, anthropology, population genetics and palaeoecology. He has a strong track record in developing novel quantitative analysis that brings together information from a wide range of fields, including bioinformatics, palaeoclimate, geography and ancient and modern DNA, to investigate human evolution and reconstructing the demographic history of past and present populations. He has published 69 peer reviewed papers and has an h-index of 22 (Scopus).

His current research is focussed on how adaptations to past climates, diets and pathogens have shaped genetic diversity in contemporary populations and the role of these changes in common metabolic, cardiovascular and immune mediated diseases. To investigate these questions, he is using an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the fields of mathematics and statistics, evolutionary biology and medical genomics. Specifically, it combines biomedical and genetic information with development of methods and tools to identify novel variants under recent selection in human populations, reconstruct the evolutionary history of disease associated variants, understand the interplay between genetic variants in disease aetiology and use this information under a unified framework to improve disease risk prediction.