Gilean McVean

From 1991 to 1994, he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford. He completed his PhD in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge supervised by Laurence Hurst in 1998.

McVean completed postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh from 1997 to 2000, supervised by Brian and Deborah Charlesworth.

From 2000 to 2004, he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Oxford, where he has also been a University lecturer in Mathematical Genetics since 2004. He was reappointed in 2009 until retirement age. In October 2006, he was appointed professor of statistical genetics at the University of Oxford.

McVean's research focuses on population genetics, statistics and evolutionary biology including the International HapMap Project, recombination rates in the human genome and the 1000 Genomes Project.

McVean developed a statistical method to look at recombination rate which helped to identify PRDM9 as a hotspot positioning gene. In 2014, with Peter Donnelly, McVean co-founded Genomics plc, a genomics analysis company, as a corporate spin-off of the University of Oxford. In 2017, he was a founding director of the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.