Research Interests

Studies of genetic variation in human populations are revolutionizing medical genetics. Assessing association of genes to common disease requires a deep understanding of neutral human genetic variation. My work focuses on how variation in the frequencies of genetic variants arises from evolutionary history, bridging theoretical population genetics and empirical studies of variation in different human populations. My background in computer science and statistics allows me to develop theoretical tools and apply them to large-scale data sets.

Selected Publications

A. Keinan, J. C. Mullikin, N. Patterson, and D. Reich. Measurement of the human allele frequency spectrum demonstrates greater genetic drift in East Asians than in Europeans. Nature Genetics, 39, 1251-5 (2007). (Supplementary information; Data)

G. Ayodo, A. L. Price, A. Keinan, A. Ajwang, M. F. Otieno, A. S. S. Orago, N. Patterson, and D. Reich. Combining evidence of natural selection with association analysis increases power to detect Malaria-resistance variants. American Journal of Human Genetics, 81, 234-242 (2007).

A. Keinan, B. Sandbank, C. C. Hilgetag, I. Meilijson, and E. Ruppin. Axiomatic scalable neurocontroller analysis via the Shapley value. Artificial Life, 12(3), 333-352 (2006).

A. Kaufman*, A. Keinan*, I. Meilijson, M. Kupiec, and E. Ruppin. (*equal contribution) Quantitative analysis of genetic and neuronal multi-perturbation experiments. PLoS Computational Biology, 1(6), 500-506 (2005).

A. Keinan, B. Sandbank, C. C. Hilgetag, I. Meilijson, and E. Ruppin. Fair attribution of functional contribution in artificial and biological networks. Neural Computation, 16(9), 1887-1915 (2004).

A. Keinan, I. Meilijson, and E. Ruppin. Controlled analysis of neurocontrollers with informational lesioning. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A (special themed issue on Biologically-inspired robotics), 361 (1811), 2123-2144 (2003).

All publications

CV

pdf , doc

Contact Info

Mail address
Alon Keinan
HMS Department of Genetics
New Research Building, office #336
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, MA 02115

Tel: (617) 432-5992
Fax: (617) 432-6306
Email:

Last update: Aug 2008

"...cause if we cease to ask, we will cease to grow if we don't go far, we will soon fall.”         ( Mookie Di, translated from Hebrew)