Dr. Oscar Lao completed his PhD in Health & Life Sciences at Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona in 2004. For the next ten years, he was involved in postdoctoral research in the Forensic Molecular Biology Department of Erasmus University Medical Centre.

He started his own team of Population Genomics at CNAG-CRG in 2015, was recognised as Junior PI by CRG in January 2018. In October 2020, he recieved a Cientifico Titular position at Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (IBE).

At his new position, his group addressed questions related to the genomic origin of a given individual, which are the demographic and selective factors that shaped the genetic variation present in a population, and how ultimately this variation influences and allows us to detect the individual risk in complex common diseases. In order to achieve these goals, they are actively working on developing new tools and machine learning algorithms for describing population substructure in the genome and understanding the biological implications of such structure, identifying the fingerprint of polygenic adaptation in complex phenotypes and evaluating the impact of archaic introgression in phenotypes of interest.

For Dr. Brian Shirts, his work in the University of Washington, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology focuses on improving resources and communication for hereditary cancer prevention. In his clinical work as a molecular pathologist he noticed that many people get cancer because they do not know about hereditary cancer risk that runs in their families. His research to address this issue developed into ConnectMyVariant, a non-profit that leverages genetic, genealogy, and social networking technology to help people across the world find and connect with others who have the same pathogenic variants. This allows people to share preventions stories, find common ancestors, and encourage each other to let more relatives know about inherited cancer risk.