Dr. Andrew G. Clark stands as a preeminent figure in the field of population genetics, currently holding the distinguished Jacob Gould Schurman Professorship in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University. He maintains joint appointments in Biological Statistics & Computational Biology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of his work. Educated at Brown University where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology and Applied Mathematics in 1976, he pursued doctoral studies at Stanford University, completing his Ph.D. in Population Genetics in 1980 under Marc Feldman. Prior to his tenure at Cornell beginning in 2002, Clark established his research program at Penn State University, where he developed foundational methodologies in population genetic analysis.
Clark's laboratory has produced transformative contributions to both human and Drosophila population genetics, publishing over 400 peer-reviewed papers with more than 48,000 citations and an impressive H-index of 87. His research group pioneered methods for haplotype inference, detection of natural selection from sequence data, and demographic inference, significantly advancing analytical frameworks used throughout the field. He played a pivotal role in the Drosophila 12 Genomes Project, coordinating analysis across multiple institutions to elucidate evolutionary patterns across the Drosophila genus. Co-authoring the seminal textbook Principles of Population Genetics with Daniel Hartl, Clark has shaped the education of generations of geneticists, while his work on context-dependent genetic variation in cardiovascular disease risk has bridged population genetics with medical applications.
As head of Cornell's Graduate Field of Computational Biology and co-director of the Center for Comparative and Population Genomics, Clark has cultivated a collaborative research environment that fosters interdisciplinary innovation across genomics. He has served on the National Human Genome Research Institute Council and editorial boards of premier journals including Cell and Genetics, significantly influencing the direction of genomic research. His current investigations focus on RNA-sequencing in reciprocal crosses across diverse organisms to unravel genomic imprinting and sex chromosome inactivation mechanisms. Recognized with election to both the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, Clark continues to lead cutting-edge research while mentoring the next generation of population geneticists through his extensive collaborative network.
