Eran Elhaik


Eran Elhaik is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, and an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden. His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.

Career

After completing undergraduate studies in Israel, he obtained a PhD in molecular evolution under the supervision of Dan Graur at the University of Houston in 2009, followed by postdoctoral research fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Public Health. From 2014 to 2019 he worked at the University of Sheffield Department of Animal and Plant Sciences in the United Kingdom. Since 2019 he has been an associate professor of bioinformatics at the Department of Biology at Lund University in Sweden.

Research

In the field of molecular evolution, Elhaik worked on the compositional domain model that describes the compositional organization of animal genomes.
In the field of complex disorders, he proposed that the allostatic load theory could be used to explain bipolar disorder
and Sudden infant death syndrome. According to this theory, the accumulation of perinatal and prenatal stressors has neurotoxic effects with consequences to one's health.
In the field of genetics, Elhaik was part of the team that designed the GenoChip microarray for the Genographic Project and their online tests. He also contributed to the development of algorithms for data compression.
In the field of population genetics, Elhaik has published papers analyzing the ancestries of European Jews and Druze, including work related to the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, a contentious subject that has received media attention. Elhaik argues for a non-Levantine origin of the Ashkenazi and favours the hypothesis that they are of mixed Irano-Turko-Slavic and southern European descent.