I currently work on developing software currently called "SparsePainter" for efficient chromosome painting.

My research mainly focuses on applying statistical methods to population genetics.

I have developed a C++ software for efficient local ancestry inference, which is freely available from GitHub:

SparsePainter

I have also developed two R packages which are available from CRAN:

LDAandLDAS: Linkage Disequilibrium of Ancestry (LDA) and LDA Score (LDAS)

HTRX: Haplotype Trend Regression with eXtra Flexibility

Publications:

Barrie, W., Yang, Y., Irving-Pease, E.K. et al. Elevated genetic risk for multiple sclerosis emerged in steppe pastoralist populations. Nature 625, 321–328 (2024).

Yang, Y., Durbin, R., Iversen, A.K.N & Lawson, D.J. Sparse haplotype-based fine-scale local ancestry inference at scale reveals recent selection on immune responses. Nature Communications 16, 2742 (2025).

Yang, Y. & Lawson, D.J. HTRX: an R package for learning non-contiguous haplotypes associated with a phenotype. Bioinformatics Advances 3.1, vbad038 (2023).

Yang, Y. & Lawson D.J. From individuals to ancestries: towards attributing trait variation to haplotypes, medRxiv (2025), doi=10.1101/2025.03.13.25323895. 

Talks and Posters:

Sparse haplotype-based fine-scale local ancestry inference at scale reveals recent selection on immune responses, Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics 2024, April 2024

SparsePainter: an efficient fine-scale chromosome painting software, Chromosome painting conference, August 2023

HTRX: Haplotype Trend Regression with eXtra flexibility for learning SNPs and non-contiguous haplotypes associated with a phenotype. IEU monthly meeting, University of Bristol, November 2022.

Using ancient DNA to understand Multiple Sclerosis, Research Students' Conference in Population Genetics, University of Warwick, June 2022.

Using ancient DNA to understand Multiple Sclerosis, Statistics discussion group, MRC IEU, University of Bristol, April 2022.

Teaching/Marking:

MATH10013/MATH11300 Probability and Statistics

MATH30015 Bayesian Modelling

MATH30013 Linear and Generalised Linear Models

MATH10011 Analysis

MATH10010 Introduction to Group Theory