Luke Anderson-Trocmé
Assistant Professor of Population Genetics
Université de Montréal
Research
My research investigates how genetic ancestry spreads across space and time, and how demographic history shapes patterns of genetic diversity. I combine large-scale genealogical records with population-genomic data to develop statistical, computational, and simulation-based methods that treat ancestry as a spatial and temporal process rather than a static label. This work integrates data analysis, model development, and visualization to connect real demographic history to observed genetic variation.
A central contribution of my research is a first-author Science (2023) study on French Canadians, which integrated multi-century genealogies with genome-wide data to show that much of today's fine-scale population structure can be explained by recent demographic processes such as settlement history, migration, and founder effects. Building on this foundation, my current work develops empirically grounded pedigree and genome simulation tools, spatial ancestry statistics, and scalable methods for biobank-scale and comparative analyses in both human and conservation genetics.
Background
- PhD – McGill University (2022)
- MSc – McGill University (2016)
- NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship awardee
Links
Software
- LegacyData – Code for "Legacy data confound genomics studies" (MBE, 2020)
- genes_in_space – Spatial analysis of genetic variation