Important Information

• When: 📅 16th of October 2026, 13:00 CET
• Where: 🌐 Online (via Zoom) 🧑‍💻
• Price: 💰 Free

The next HAAM Radio Webinar will be taking place online on the 16th of October, 2026 starting 13 CET! This webinar focusing on advances in bioinformatic methods for paleogenomic analysis will be structured as a workshop titled “Genes, Ancestry, Immunity: Insights from local ancestry inference leveraging ancient DNA and biobank sources” presented by Dr Daniel Lawson, Professor of Data Science in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK.

Full abstract:

Ancient DNA allows a form of supervised ancestry inference based on haplotypes and local ancestry inference. This can be used to map disease loci, investigate relationships between modern populations, improve association studies, and study demographic histories. Newly developed methods are capable of processing hundreds of thousands to millions of samples—sizes typical of the most demanding modern biobanks and association studies. Conversely, ancient DNA resources are varied and smaller, encouraging focus on tools that carefully retain genetic relationships. Both sets of tools are increasingly accessible and can provide different types of insight.

The talk is split into two sections. The first half is a seminar exploring the insights that LAI can offer in the format of a seminar suitable for interdisciplinary researchers, covering the motivation and implications of a haplotype-focused approach to ancient DNA. This will explore important insights to medicine in the form of human immune disease, in particular telling a story of the historical timescale evolution of immune-related disease in humans and our pets. This describes the origins of multiple sclerosis and other immune-related diseases and required both ancient and modern DNA sources, and tells a story of very recent - perhaps ongoing - selection on human populations. The second, optional, section follows a break and provides a practical workshop aimed to give an overview of how to work with LAI, focusing on recent scalable algorithms (SparsePainter and PBWTpaint) designed for identifying fine-scale population structure under different use cases spanning biobank scale modern datasets to ancient DNA. Attendees can attend the first session only.

The talks will be followed by a Discussion and Q&A between speakers and attendees, where priority will be given to questions from Early Career Researchers.

Registration

If you would like to attend the webinar, please register here or scan the QR code below.

⚠️ For security reasons, registration is required to receive the zoom link.

The Zoom link will be sent out to participants, who have registered their attendance, and presenters via email on the 15th of October 2026.

Organisation team: Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, Xavier Roca Rada, Tina Saupe