XINJUN ZHANG, PHD
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About me and my future lab (starting 2023)

Welcome to my home page. I am an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (starting February 2023). Currently I am a NIH K99/R00 postdoctoral fellow at UCLA advised by Kirk Lohmueller and Sriram Sankararaman. I hold a PhD degree in Genetic Anthropology from University of California, Davis (2017), and a BS degree in Biology from Beijing Normal University (2012). 

As a population geneticist by training,
I conduct research that lies at the intersection of anthropology, empirical population genetics, and statistical methods development. I use various empirical genomic datasets, evolution theories and quantitative methods to answer a series of questions under the big picture of human evolution and health disparities. I am particularly driven by a fundamental question of how admixture and natural selection shaped human phenotypic and genetic diversity, and my current research avenues are inter-connected by this core question that each addresses the problem from a different perspective.

Some of my recent projects include: 1) Examining the genomic consequences of Denisovan introgression in high altitude adaptation in Tibetan population; 2) Using extensive simulations and machine learning methods to infer adaptive introgression accounting for the effect of deleterious variants; 3) The inference of dominance and the development of non-additive models for estimating complex diseases in recently admixed human populations.  

Hiring alert:
I'll be hiring Postdocs and PhD students starting from 2023! If you are looking for postdoc positions or PhD programs, and are interested in population/evolutionary/anthropological/statistical genetics, machine learning, simulation-based inference, and bioinformatics, please get in touch! For the details of my ongoing research projects, please refer to the link below.

Research Descriptions
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  • NEWS and BLOG