Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_K_Xdf5lqU
Dr. Warren Ewens joins Sally Otto (UBC) and James O'Dwyer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) to discuss the development of mathematical population genetics and genomics.
Warren received his PhD with Patrick Moran from the Australian National University and has held professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, La Trobe, and Monash University. Warren is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Tune in to hear Warren talk about how important it is to bridge ideas and fields.
Best advice given to Warren: "Get out of that ivory tower and do something useful” This led to his working in human disease genetics for twenty years and to his most cited work (“Transmission test for linkage disequilibrium: the insulin gene region and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM)" Am J Hum Genet 1993 52:506-16). It also led to his work on ascertainment sampling.
Notable quote: "Play to your strengths” Aha moment: Having worked on the math for sampling alleles from a population, Warren realized at once that standard methods to estimate theta (4*N*mu) from heterozygosity was using exactly the wrong part of the data and that it would be more powerful to use allelic counts.
Do you have a paper that you wish were better known - a gold nugget paper? The 1992 paper “An optimizing principle of natural selection in evolutionary population genetics” (https://doi.org/10.1016/0040-5809(92)90019-P).
What do you wish was better understood? Hear Warren's thoughts on effective population size (Ne), Fisher's Fundamental Theorem, and much more!
The Society for Modeling and Theory in Population Biology is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
