Prof Jukka Corander

Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Professor of statistics

Professor Jukka Corander has collaborated with teams at the Sanger Institute since 2010, on both developing and applying statistical methods for bacterial population genomics.

I am an Associate Faculty member in the Parasites and Microbes programme, working with large-scale genomic surveillance of microbial pathogens. The focus of my research is on studying the evolution of resistance and virulence, and modeling transmission of pathogens using advanced computational methods.

I work most closely with David Aanensen, Stephen Bentley, and Nicholas Thomson in the Parasites and Microbes Programme. The joint research efforts between Sanger Institute scientists and my group have led to software packages for population structure and recombination inference, GWAS (genome-wide associations studies) and genome-wide epistasis analysis.

I have multidisciplinary research interests combining in particular microbial evolution and transmission modeling, statistical machine learning, genomics and Bayesian inference algorithms. I received the ERC Starting grant 2009-2014 for developing stochastic inference algorithms and I am leading an ERC Advanced grant project SCARABEE (2017-2022) for computational evolutionary epidemiology. My group has developed multiple methods for statistical population genomics in bacteria, including population structure estimation (BAPS, hierBAPS, fastbaps), GWAS (SEER, pyseer) and GWES (SuperDCA, SpydrPick). We are currently coordinating the development of the ELFI software for likelihood-free inference for computer simulator-based models.

Since 2016 I have been a Professor of biostatistics at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway and, since 2009, a Professor of statistics at University of Helsinki, Finland.