Alan Aw

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Statistical and Population Genetics with Iain Mathieson at the Department of Genetics, where I also work with Bogdan Pasaniuc at the recently established Center for Computational Biomedicine. I earned my PhD in Statistics at UC Berkeley. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Mathematical and Computational Science (with Honors in Mathematical Biology) at Stanford. I am a science communication advocate, and I enjoy baking and cooking whenever time permits.

Research Interests

I develop and apply mathematical, computational and statistical methods to answer questions in genetics. Genetic risk predictors have enormous clinical potential, but their accuracy often breaks down across populations — a problem with both scientific and equity dimensions. I am interested in mechanistically understanding and improving the generalizability of gene-level and polygenic risk predictors across groups of individuals or larger and ancestrally diverse populations. I am also interested in mathematical problems and computational algorithms arising from analyses of high-dimensional genomic data.

Teaching and Mentoring

During my PhD at UC Berkeley, I served as a teaching assistant for an introductory mathematical statistics course (undergraduate) and an upper-division/graduate introduction to time series analysis. I have mentored students on research and on the graduate school application process, and have served as an external examiner on a master’s thesis.

Publications

News

• [April 2026] Breaking a hiatus from mathematical research, I wrote a preprint bringing together ideas from probabilistic combinatorics and the genetics of admixed groups. I gave a talk about it at the Applied Mathematics seminar at UC Santa Cruz.
• [May 2025] I received a T32 Training Grant in Genomic Medicine. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue working to improve generalizability of genetic findings, with support from Iain and Dr. Bogdan Pasaniuc.
• [Nov. 2024] Our work on causal effect heterogeneity between admixed individuals was selected as a Reviewer’s Choice Poster for ASHG 2024! Feel free to check out the poster here.

Selected Publications

Powered by Jekyll and Minimal Light theme.