Rasmus Nielsen (born January 27, 1970) is a Danish biologist and professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. His research focuses on statistical genetics and

computational genomics Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data (i.e., experimental data obtai ...

as they relate to

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 ...

. Much of his research has focused on the molecular mechanisms of evolutionary adaptations. For example, in 2010, his research group discovered the variant in the

EPAS1 Endothelial PAS domain-containing protein 1 (EPAS1, also known as hypoxia-inducible factor-2alpha (HIF-2α)) is a protein that is encoded by the ''EPAS1'' gene in mammals. It is a type of hypoxia-inducible factor, a group of transcription factor ...

gene that allows

Tibetan Tibetan may mean: * of, from, or related to Tibet * Tibetan people, an ethnic group * Tibetan language: ** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard ** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...

s to live at high altitudes. His research has also identified an evolved genetic adaptation among the

Inuit Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories ...

that allows them to metabolize

fatty acid In chemistry, particularly in biochemistry, a fatty acid is a carboxylic acid with an aliphatic chain, which is either saturated or unsaturated. Most naturally occurring fatty acids have an unbranched chain of an even number of carbon atoms, ...

References

External links

Faculty page
* 1970 births Living people Danish geneticists Danish biologists Evolutionary biologists Statistical geneticists Danish emigrants to the United States UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Population geneticists Cornell University faculty University of Copenhagen alumni Sloan Research Fellows {{Geneticist-stub