Jonathan Pritchard

Jonathan Pritchard is the Bing Professor of Population Studies, in the departments of Genetics and Biology at Stanford University. He grew up in England, and studied at Penn State, Stanford, and Oxford. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2001 and returned to Stanford University in 2013. His lab has done wide-ranging research on using genetics to study human population structure, history, and adaptation, and on understanding the mechanisms by which genetic variation affects gene regulation and complex traits. One of his early contributions was the Structure algorithm for using genetic data to infer population structure and personal ancestry, which has been widely influential and cited more than 40,000 times. More recently, his lab has made essential contributions on modeling and interpreting the genetic basis of complex traits and diseases. A current focus is on how to use experimental perturbation methods to model human gene regulatory networks for understanding complex traits, with a particular focus on the immune system. He has been recognized with various honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.