Gilean Alistair Tristram McVean (born February 1973) is a professor of statistical

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, fellow of

Linacre College, Oxford Linacre College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in the UK whose members comprise approximately 50 fellows and 550 postgraduate students. Linacre is a diverse college in terms of both the international composition of its me ...

and co-founder and director of Genomics plc. He also co-chaired the

1000 Genomes Project The 1000 Genomes Project (abbreviated as 1KGP), launched in January 2008, was an international research effort to establish by far the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation. Scientists planned to sequence the genomes of at least one th ...

analysis group.

Education

From 1991-94, he completed a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford.Gil McVean's He completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

supervised by Laurence Hurst in 1998.

Career and research

McVean completed

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

from 1997 to 2000, supervised by

Brian Brian (sometimes spelled Bryan in English) is a male given name of Irish and Breton origin, as well as a surname of Occitan origin. It is common in the English-speaking world. It is possible that the name is derived from an Old Celtic word me ...

and

Deborah Charlesworth Deborah Charlesworth (née Maltby; born 1943) is a population geneticist from the UK, notable for her important discoveries in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Her most notable research is in understanding the evolution of recomb ...

. From 2000-04, he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Oxford, where he has also been a University lecturer in Mathematical Genetics since 2004. He was reappointed in 2009 until retirement age. In October 2006, he was appointed professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford. McVean's research focuses on

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as Adaptation (biology), adaptation, ...

, statistics and

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes ( natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life ...

including the

International HapMap Project The International HapMap Project was an organization that aimed to develop a haplotype map (HapMap) of the human genome, to describe the common patterns of human genetic variation. HapMap is used to find genetic variants affecting health, disease ...

, recombination rates in the

human genome The human genome is a complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans, encoded as DNA within the 23 chromosome pairs in cell nuclei and in a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. These are usually treated separately as the ...

and the

. McVean developed a statistical method to look at recombination rate which helped to identify

PRDM9 PR domainpositive-regulatory domain zinc finger protein 9 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''PRDM9'' gene. PRDM9 is responsible for positioning recombination hotspots during meiosis by binding a DNA sequence motif encoded in its zinc ...

as a hotspot positioning gene. In 2014, with

Peter Donnelly Sir Peter James Donnelly (born 15 May 1959) is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contrib ...

, McVean co-founded Genomics plc, a genomics analysis company, as a

corporate spin-off A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, or starburst or hive-off, is a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" a section as a separate business or creates a second incarnation, even if the first is still active. Characte ...

of the University of Oxford. In 2017, he was a founding director of the

Big Data Institute The Big Data Institute (BDI), part of the Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, is an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford. The institute brings together researchers from both the Nuffield Departmen ...

at the University of Oxford.

Honours and awards

In 2006 McVean was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2010, McVean was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and delivered that year's lecture entitled "Our genomes, our history". In 2012, he was awarded the

Weldon Memorial Prize The Weldon Memorial Prize, also known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is given yearly by the University of Oxford. The prize is to be awarded without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgeme ...

. In 2013, he presented a talk TEDxWarwick entitled ''A Thousand Genomes a Thousand Stories''. In May 2014, McVean was elected as a member of the

European Molecular Biology Organisation The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a professional, non-profit organization of more than 1,800 life scientists. Its goal is to promote research in life science and enable international exchange between scientists. It co-funds cour ...

. McVean was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and a

Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) is an award for medical scientists who are judged by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences for the "excellence of their science, their contribution to medicine and society and the range of th ...

(FMedSci).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McVean, Gil Living people Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Fellows of Linacre College, Oxford British statisticians Population geneticists British bioinformaticians Fellows of the Royal Society 1973 births