Rasmus Nielsen received a Master’s Degree in biology from University of Copenhagen in 1994 and a PhD in population genetics from UC Berkeley in 1998.  After a postdoc at Harvard University, he has held faculty positions at Cornell University, University of Copenhagen and UC Berkeley.  He is currently a Professor of Computational Biology in the departments of Integrative Biology and Statistics at UC Berkeley. Nielsen's expertise is in statistical and population genetic analyses of genomic data. Much of his current research concerns statistical analysis of next-generation sequencing data, in the context of both medical genetics and population genetics.  Many of his research contributions have been aimed at developing methods for detecting the effects of natural selection or inferring past population history from genetic data.  He has also worked on inference problems in molecular evolution, comparative genomics and medical genetics.