Dr Vladimir Shchur

Postdoctoral Fellow

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

I got my PhD in Mathematics working on a geometric problem. Then I switched to genomics and bioinformatics and now my primary interest is an Ancestral Recombination Graph which is a data structure including the complete genealogical information of a set of genomes. I work on designing fast and scalable algorithms for ARG generation for large data sets (e.g. 1000 Genome Project genome-wide).

Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG) is a data structure including the complete genealogical information of a set of genomes. In each locus genomes are related by a genealogical tree, which is called a local tree. But because of recombinations happening in the ancestry, these trees change from site to site. ARG is a data structure which handles all these relations. Many questions about population structure, ancestry and age of mutations and many others could be answered if we knew ARGs.

It turns out that ARG is a very complicated object with a huge state space, so the traditional statistical methods for inference are very limited for this problem because of computational hardness. I develop a data structure which allows fast manipulations with ARG, naturally carries the important features of its structure and hence allows scalable ARG generation/inference from thouthands of genomes.

Before switching to genomics and coming to Sanger, I studied pure Mathematics in Moscow State Iniversity (2004-2009) in Russia and in University Paris 11 Orsay (2009-2013) in France. My current job allows me to plunge into the facinating mixture of biology with challenging mathematical problems.

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