The lab develops methods and theory in statistical and population genetics, with applications to medicine, biology, and history, in particular in the context of the Jewish population. Current research is focused on the following areas.

Medical genetics:

• Genome-wide association studies of various phenotypes, particularly in cardiology and ophthalmology
• Carrier screening in Ashkenazi Jews
• Technologies for pre-implantation genetic testing of human embryos
• Genetic risk and trait prediction and their limitations

Population genetics:

• The effect of demography on genomic similarity between individuals in a population
• Inferring the ancestry and past demographic events of modern and ancient populations
• Applications to Ashkenazi Jews and other Israeli populations
• Genealogies and models of recombination

Selected publications:
J. Xue, T. Lencz, A. Darvasi, I. Pe’er, and S. Carmi. The Time and Place of European Admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish History. PLoS Genet. 13, e1006644 (2017).

L. King, J. Wakeley, and S. Carmi. A non-zero variance of Tajima’s estimator for two sequences even for infinitely many unlinked loci. Theor. Popul. Biol. 122, 22 (2018).

Y. Erlich, T. Shor, I. Pe’er, and S. Carmi. Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches. Science 362, 690 (2018).

E. Granot-Hershkovitz, D. Karasik, Y. Friedlander, …, I. Peter, S. Carmi*, and H. Hochner*. A study of Kibbutzim in Israel reveals risk factors for cardiometabolic traits and subtle population structure. Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 26, 1848 (2018).

R. Schweiger, Y. Erlich, and S. Carmi. FactorialHMM: Fast and exact inference in factorial hidden Markov models. Bioinformatics 35, 2162 (2019).

D. Backenroth, F. Zahdeh, …, G. Altarescu*, S. Carmi*, and D. A. Zeevi*. Haploseek: A 24-hour all-in-one method for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) of monogenic disease and aneuploidy. Genet. Med. 21, 1390 (2019).

D. Backenroth and S. Carmi. A test for deviations from expected genotype frequencies on the X chromosome for sex-biased admixed populations. Heredity 123, 470 (2019).

H. Fridman, D. Behar, S. Carmi, and E. Levy-Lahad. Preconception carrier screening yield: effect of variants of unknown significance in partners of carriers with clinically significant variants. Genet. Med., 22, 646 (2020).

E. Karavani*, O. Zuk*, D. Zeevi, …, T. Lencz*, and S. Carmi*. Screening human embryos for polygenic traits has limited utility. Cell, 179, 1424 (2019).

L. Agranat-Tamir, S. Waldman, …, B. Yakir, R. Pinhasi*, S. Carmi*, I. Finkelstein*, L. Carmel*, and D. Reich*. The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant. Cell, in press (2020).

Requirements:

• PhD in a quantitative field
• Programming experience: one or (preferably) more of Linux (shell scripting), Python, C++/Java, R.
• Strong quantitative skills, in particular in probabilistic modeling and statistics, and experience in data analysis.
• Experience in genomics or bioinformatics is an advantage.