Research in the Huff Lab is concentrated on understanding human evolution and the genetic basis of human disease through statistical, computational, and population genomics. Our central focus is the development of new methods to analyze genomic data and the application of those methods to discover novel insights about the genetic basis of human disease, with particular emphasis on the identification and characterization of cancer susceptibility genes. We have active research efforts underway in melanoma as well as colorectal, head and neck, pancreatic, and prostate cancer.

Additional areas of interest include:

• Identifying intermediate-risk and high-risk cancer susceptibility loci from the analysis of rare genetic variation.
• Development of methods and software to identify disease-causing genes from high-throughput sequencing data
• Development new methods for pedigree analysis, distant relationship detection, and pedigree reconstruction from genomic data
• Estimation of human mutation rates
• Characterization of the genetic basis of recent positive selection
• Reconstructing human demographic history