Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution.Pritchard Lab website: http://pritchardlab.stanford.edu His research interests lie in the study of

human evolution ''Homo sapiens'' is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as Human skeletal changes due to bipedalism, bipedalism, de ...

, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits. He was elected a Member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 2025.

Education

Pritchard's family moved to the US when he was a teenager. He studied

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

and

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

, and then went on to graduate studies in biology at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

under the supervision of Marc Feldman, finishing in 1998.

Career

Pritchard conducted

postdoctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

with Peter Donnelly at the University of Oxford. It was there that he developed STRUCTURE, a widely used computer program for determining population structure and estimating individual admixture. In 2001, he moved to the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

. He was promoted from Assistant Professor to Full Professor in 2006. He stayed there until moving to Stanford in 2013. He was awarded a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

(HHMI) investigator position in 2008.Jonathan K. Pritchard, Ph.D.
Bios of the 2008 New HHMI Investigators, HHMI, retrieved 2011-07-24.

Awards and honours

Pritchard was a recipient of the 2013 Edward Novitski Prize from the

Genetics Society of America The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is a scholarly membership society of more than 5,500 genetics researchers and educators, established in 1931. The Society was formed from the reorganization of the Joint Genetics Sections of the American Soc ...

and the 2002 Mitchell Prize from the

International Society for Bayesian Analysis The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) is a society with the goal of promoting Bayesian analysis for solving problems in the sciences and government. It was formally incorporated as a not for profit corporation by economist Arnold ...

Personal life

Pritchard ran track and cross country for

from 1989 to 1994. In part because of his running experience, he appeared in the 1998 movie

Without Limits ''Without Limits'' is a 1998 American biographical sports film. It is written and directed by Robert Towne and follows the relationship between record-breaking distance runner Steve Prefontaine and his coach Bill Bowerman, who later co-founde ...

portraying

David Bedford David Vickerman Bedford (4 August 1937 – 1 October 2011) was an English composer and musician. He wrote and played both popular and classical music. He was the brother of the conductor Steuart Bedford, the grandson of the composer, painter ...

, an English distance runner who participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics. As a result of his appearance in ''Without Limits'' and his publication of ″Population Growth of Human Y Chromosomes: A study of Y Chromosome Microsatellites″ with

Marcus Feldman Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational ...

, he has an

Erdős–Bacon number A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of their Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring academic papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and their Bacon number—which represents t ...

of 6.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pritchard, Jonathan K. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Howard Hughes Medical Investigators English emigrants to the United States 21st-century American biologists American geneticists British population geneticists Eberly College of Science alumni Stanford University alumni University of Chicago faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences