Szpiech Lab

We are a computational biology lab in the Department of Biology at Penn State University in State College, PA. We work at the interface of population genetics and evolutionary genomics. Our work has relevance to a number of fields including medical genetics, anthropology, and conservation genetics. Using mathematical modeling, simulations, and large-scale data analysis, we seek to understand the relationship between recent demographic history, inbreeding, and natural selection on the distribution of genetic variation within and between populations. We aim to exploit our knowledge of these processes to develop methods to identify and characterize the genomic consequences of adaptation and to learn about the origin and genetic architecture of disease and other phenotypes.