Jonathan K. Pritchard

Dr. Johnathan Pritchard is a Professor of Human Genetics at Stanford University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Pritchard has contributed important discoveries in evolutionary genomics that paved the way for modern evolutionary genetics, thereby enabling nearly all genome-based disease and phenotype discoveries over the last decade. His seminal insight concerning the structure of human populations world-wide permitted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to be conducted for the first time using data from entire populations and not just from family pedigrees. This revolutionized and hugely expanded how we search for disease genes. The nearly immediate and broad application of GWAS in such fields as the ecology of endangered species and computational biology has illustrated the far-reaching applications of his paradigm. More recently, Pritchard contributed one of the first analyses of selective pressures on the human genome and demonstrated both strong and partial/weak sweeps across the genome. He was also able to demonstrate, that for most of human evolutionary history, it is the partial, weaker sweeps that have led to the rise of the polygenic nature of most human phenotypes and diseases. His honors include the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and Paper of the Year award from the Lancet. Pritchard’s papers appear in Current Biology, Nature, and Science.