Siepel

Adam Siepel, associate professor of biological statistics and computational biology, has received a Guggenheim fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

In its 88th annual competition for the United States and Canada, the foundation awarded 181 fellowships to artists, scientists and scholars, chosen from some 3,000 applicants on the basis of "prior achievement and exceptional promise," according to the foundation's website.

Siepel researches problems at the intersection of computer science, statistics, evolutionary biology and genomics. His research has touched on such diverse topics as the identification of recombinant strains of HIV, the discovery of new human genes, the characterization of the non-protein-coding "dark matter" of mammalian genomes and the estimation of the times in early human history when major population groups first diverged. A general theme in his work is the development of precise mathematical models for the complex processes by which genomes evolve over time. He uses these models with techniques from computer science and statistics to peer into the past and to address questions of practical importance for human health.

Siepel will use the fellowship to support a sabbatical leave for the 2012-13 academic year in Cambridge, U.K. While there, he will work at the European Bioinformatics Institute in nearby Hinxton. In addition to continuing his research in computational genomics, he plans to explore opportunities for collaboration in Cambridge and to write a book for a popular audience on genomics and computational biology.