1 January 2025 – Dr Yan Wong New Committee Member

Yan Wong ordinary Committee Member for Corporate Genetics and Biotechnology

The Genetics Society is proud to welcome Dr Yan Wong as a member of the committee as a representative of Corporate Genetics and Biotechnology, beginning his four-year term in January 2025.

“I’m an evolutionary geneticist with an interest in a wide range of biological problems. After a DPhil in Plant Sciences at Oxford, I collaborated with Richard Dawkins to write The Ancestor’s Tale, a history of life in reverse time. This was followed by a position as a lecturer in Evolution and Population Genetics at the University of Leeds. I then changed tack with a foray into science media, most notably as a TV presenter on the BBC One show Bang Goes The Theory, but also on radio, for example for the More or Less Radio 4 series. In parallel with this, and together with James Rosindell at Imperial College, I developed the OneZoom project, an online visualisation of the entire tree of life down to the species level. Since 2017 I have worked at Oxford University’s Big Data Institute (BDI), initially with Gil Mcvean then with Jerome Kelleher and colleagues.

At the BDI I am part of an international collaboration to maintain and develop open source software used to simulate, store and analyse huge genomic datasets. We focus on an “evolutionary encoding” of the data, in a format known as a tree sequence. This efficently encodes the genetic history, or genealogy, of DNA sequences, and is part of an ongoing revolution in genetic analysis of population-level data. Our main focus is on datasets where millions of genomes are currently available (e.g. humans and SARS-CoV2), but the promise of long-read data based on millions of samples from other species means that our techniques are expected to become widely applicable in biology.”