Speaker: Yaniv Erlich, PhD

 
Co-Sponsored by JewishGen.org at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
 
DNA.Land is a new not-for-profit online platform developed by scientists at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University, which offers cutting-edge tools to analyze genomic information for non-experts. Anyone who has tested at 23andMe, Family Tree DNA or AncestryDNA, for example, can freely upload their existing genomic information or request to be tested. The tools include automatic algorithms that fill in the missing pieces in the genome using sophisticated mathematical modeling, reveal deep ancestries using comprehensive panels, and generate a relative finder report. In addition, users can decide whether to contribute their information for scientific research, while preserving their privacy choices. Dr. Erlich will describe his previous studies with massive genetic genealogy datasets and present the functionality of DNA.Land and its impact on users and biomedical research. Dr. Yaniv Erlich is a Core Member at the New York Genome Center and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at Columbia University. Prior to these positions, he was a Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tel-Aviv University, Israel (2006) and a PhD from the Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2010). Dr. Erlich’s research interests are computational human genetics. Dr. Erlich is the recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award (2013), Harold M. Weintraub Award (2010), the IEEE/ACM-CS HPC Award (2008), and was selected as one of 2010 Tomorrow’s PIs team of Genome Technology.