Arbel Harpak is assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a Pew Foundation Scholar. He holds a B.S. in both mathematics and physics and an M.S. in ecology/evolution from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also holds an M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University, where he was advised by Jonathan Pritchard as a Stanford Center for Evolutionary and Human Genomics fellow.
Harpak studies how genetic variation arises and how it is shaped by evolutionary processes such as natural selection. His lab investigates complex (or ‘polygenic’) human traits — traits affected by thousands of genetic variants along the genome, each with a small contribution. Due to their complexity, biological mechanisms can be hard to pin down, but complex traits still lend themselves to trait prediction using Polygenic Scores — functions that aggregate input from many genetic variants. Polygenic scores can, for example, predict a person’s risk for breast cancer or coronary artery disease even in the absence of other warning signs. This approach can lead to earlier intervention for at-risk individuals. Harpak’s current work aims at elucidating the windfalls and pitfalls of polygenic trait prediction.