Gilean McVean

Gilean Alistair Tristram McVean (born 1973) FRS FMedSci is a professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford, director of the Big Data Institute, fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and co-founder and director at Genomics plc He also co-chaired the 1000 Genomes Project analysis group.

Gilean McVean speaking at the 2010 GEM meeting at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI), Hinxton.

From 1991 to 1994 McVean completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford. McVean completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics, at the University of Cambridge supervised by Laurence Hurst in 1998.

Following his PhD, McVean completed postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh from 1997 to 2000 supervised by Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth. From 2000-2004 he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow, in the Department of Statistics at Oxford, where he has also been a University lecturer in Mathematical Genetics since 2004 (reappointed in 2009 until retirement age). In October 2006 he was appointed professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford.

His research focuses on population genetics, statistics and evolutionary biology including the International HapMap Project, recombination rates in the human genome and the 1000 Genomes Project. He developed a statistical method to look at recombination rate which helped to identify PRDM9 as a hotspot positioning gene.

In 2014 with Peter Donnelly he co-founded Genomics plc, a genomics analysis company, as a corporate spin-off of the University of Oxford.

He was appointed as acting director of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.

In 2006 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize.

In 2010 McVean was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and delivered that years lecture entitled "Our genomes, our history".

In 2012 McVean was awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize.

In 2013 McVean presented at TEDxWarwick with a talk entitled A Thousand Genomes a Thousand Stories.

In may of 2014 McVean was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation.

McVean was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci).