Welcome to Peter Lab!
We are a computational biology lab, currently at the University of California, Los Angeles. Several group member are also based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
and we work on a wide array of statistical and computational population genetic methods. Currently, we are in the middle of a (slow) transition to UCLA from Leipzig, and are looking to recruit graduate and undergraduate students at UCLA.
We are particularly interested in the following topics:
- Methods for the analysis of low-coverage ancient DNA
- Neandertals, Denisovans, modern humans, and our interactions
- Models for complex spatiotemporal population genetic structure
- Visualizing genetic data
(Photo by Alba Bossoms Mesa)
News
Jun 28, 2026Northwestern Neandertal paper released!
Alba's paper on Neandertal diversity in Belgium and France was published today in Nature. This is also the final chapter of her PhD!
Ben started a position in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UCLA.
Neandertal Admixture papers released!
Leo's paper on Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans was published today in Science. This was a joint effort with Priya Moorjanis lab at UC Berkeley.
Earliest modern human genome paper published
Arevs paper on the genomes from Ranis and Zlaty-Kun was published today in Nature. This study was led by Johannes Krause and Kay Prüfer.
New Preprint on PCA and F-statistics
Divy's preprint on the statistics on how we should do PCA to reveal population structure has been posted on biorxiv today. It definitely chances how I think about PCA; a main result is that we show that probabilisic versions of PCA are better at revealing population structure than most methods currently used