CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, September 14, 2015
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: 33 Oxford St., Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: James Zou (Microsoft Research New England and MIT)

Title: Integrating genomics and computational social sciences to characterize human mating patterns.

Abstract: What can we learn about our societies and ourselves by decoding the genomes of hundreds of thousands of individuals? I will discuss a recent project combining genomics with computational social sciences to characterize human mating patterns over the last few generations. We analyzed large cohorts of Mexican and Puerto Rican families and quantified how individuals assorted into couples along different axes of socio-economic attributes and genomic ancestries. These assortment patterns have significant implications for how diseases propagate through human populations. I will highlight some of the new probabilistic models and machine learning algorithms that we developed to perform these analyses. This talk will be accessible to a general audience.

Biography: James Zou is a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England and MIT. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2014 and was recently a Simons fellow at U.C. Berkeley. He is broadly interested in machine learning and applications in understanding human evolution and diseases.