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Alexander Platt is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor (Research) in the Center for Computational Genetics and Genomics and the Institute for Genetic and Evolutionary Medicine at Temple University. Platt earned a B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Population Genetics from Harvard University in 2005. His research focuses on the evolution of complex traits in structured populations, incorporating techniques from population genetics, ecology, and systems biology. Current projects include modeling haplotype evolution for inference of demography and selection, examining the genetic and epigenetic architecture of adaptive evolution, assessing effects of population structure on trait and genome architecture, and conducting association mapping for polygenic and multi-factor quantitative traits and diseases.
Platt has held postdoctoral and research positions at institutions including the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, and the Gregor Mendel Institute. He has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Molecular Evolution since 2019 and as a judge for the INFORMS Analytics Syngenta Crop Challenge Prize Committee since 2016. His teaching experience includes co-instructing BIOL 522 Human Evolutionary Genomics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 and various guest lectures and mentoring roles at Temple University and other institutions. Key publications include work on diverse African genomes revealing selection on ancient modern human introgressions, estimators of coalescent time for studying selection on variants, and studies of protein evolution and local adaptation in natural populations. Platt has contributed to research on the genetic architecture of color variation in American black bears and adaptive variation in herbivore resistance in Arabidopsis thaliana.
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A new University of Pennsylvania study published in Science shows Neanderthal-human interbreeding was predominantly male Neanderthals with female modern humans, reshaping our understanding of evolution.
A UPenn study uncovers sex-biased mating between Neanderthal males and human females, explaining Neanderthal DNA patterns in modern genomes. Dive into the genetics revolutionizing human evolution.
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