Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution.Pritchard Lab website: http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu His research interests lie in the study of

human evolution Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of '' Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development o ...

, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits.

Education

Pritchard's family moved to the US when he was a teenager. He studied

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

and mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, and then went on to graduate studies in biology at Stanford University under the supervision of Marc Feldman, finishing in 1998.

Career

Pritchard conducted

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 ...

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 ...

at the University of Oxford. It was there that he developed STRUCTURE, a widely used computer program for determining population structure and estimating individual admixture. In 2001, he moved to the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

. He was promoted from Assistant Professor to Full Professor in 2006. He stayed there until moving to Stanford in 2013. He was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator position in 2008.Jonathan K. Pritchard, Ph.D.
Bios of the 2008 New HHMI Investigators, HHMI, retrieved 2011-07-24.

Awards and honours

Pritchard was a recipient of the 2013 Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America and the 2002 Mitchell Prize from the

International Society for Bayesian Analysis The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) is a society with the goal of promoting Bayesian analysis for solving problems in the sciences and government. It was formally incorporated as a not for profit corporation by economist Arnold ...

Personal life

Pritchard ran track and cross country for Pennsylvania State University from 1989 to 1994. In part because of his running experience, he appeared in the 1998 movie

Without Limits ''Without Limits'' is a 1998 American biographical sports film. It is written and directed by Robert Towne and follows the relationship between record-breaking distance runner Steve Prefontaine and his coach Bill Bowerman, who later co-founded ...

portraying

David Bedford David Vickerman Bedford (4 August 1937 – 1 October 2011) was an English composer and musician. He wrote and played both popular and classical music. He was the brother of the conductor Steuart Bedford, the grandson of the composer, painter ...

, an English distance runner who participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics. As a result of his appearance in ''Without Limits'' and his publication of ″Population Growth of Human Y Chromosomes: A study of Y Chromosome Microsatellites″ with

Marcus Feldman Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, ...

, he has an

Erdős–Bacon number A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring academic papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents ...

of 6.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pritchard, Jonathan K. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Howard Hughes Medical Investigators English emigrants to the United States 21st-century American biologists American geneticists Population geneticists Eberly College of Science alumni Stanford University alumni University of Chicago faculty