Dr John Welch

Biography

John retrained as a biologist after a music degree and a job as a programmer. Following postdoctoral work at University of Sussex, University of Edinburgh and Université de Montpellier, John joined the Department of Genetics as a lecturer in 2010.

John’s doctoral work was in mathematical population genetics, and this is still a large part of his research, but he now combines this with empirical approaches, especially evolutionary inference from microbial genealogies, and cross-species comparative analyses.

Research Interests

John has wide interests within the field of evolutionary genetics, but his current research is focussed on two themes.

The first theme is evolution of reproductive isolation. When different populations or species hybridise, their divergent alleles are brought together in new combinations. The fitness of these combinations will help to determine the outcome of the hybridisation, and might also contain information about the mode of evolutionary divergence between the populations, and shed light on broader patterns of gene interaction. Decades of work on hybridisation has revealed a number of robust patterns that appear predictably in very distantly related groups (“Haldane’s Rule” is probably the best known). We have been trying to develop a theoretical framework that might to help to explain these patterns in a unified way, and combine simplicity and flexibility so as to be useful for data analysis.

The second theme involves evolutionary inference from the genomes of microbial pathogens. The aim here is to use the tools of classical population genetics and molecular phylogenetics to make inferences about pathogen ecology and epidemiology, that might be useful in combatting infectious disease.

Research Group Links

Welch Group

http://sitka.gen.cam.ac.uk/research/welch/GroupPage/Home.html