The Hsieh lab is interested in studying translational and evolutionary medicine at the intersection of long-read based multi-omics, evolutionary biology, and human health. Our lab is particularly interested in the fitness consequences of structural variants (SVs, e.g., deletions, duplications, and variable number of tandem repeats)—an important but understudied class of genomic variation that is known to alter many more bases than single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in the human genome, more likely to result in phenotypes and, thus, subject to selection. We use population genomics to study key evolutionary processes, such as hybridization and selection, that lead to genetic novelties in populations in response to environmental changes. Our approach to these questions combines the development of statistical modeling, long-read sequencing technology, large single-cell/single-molecule multi-omics, and biobanking databases.
